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 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.

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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?

It’s difficult to imagine what we sell might be unimportant.  It’s important to us, it’s how we make our living.  It’s important to our company, it’s why the company exists, it’s why we design and build products and solutions 

Our solutions are important to our customers—at least some of them–perhaps a certain department, a functional area, certain teams within our customers.  It used to be, at least for larger companies, that if we could come up with a business case that was compelling enough, our customers could “find the money.”  They’d take the proposal–by that time, it was theirs–something they were wanted to do, up to management and argue for the money to buy.  Most of the time they’d get it, if it met the financial and business case hurdles, they’d get the funding.  In many cases, as we qualified customers, we either looked for budget already allocated or their willingness to get the money if the business case was sufficient.

But that’s no linger happening.  Regardless how strong the case, how convinced the customer might be, they aren’t getting the money.

We try to solve that problem by calling higher–going to the “C-Level,” engaging them, pleading our case, showing the business case, talking about the compelling results and value we produce.  The C-Level executives may nod their heads in agreement, say it’s impressive, thank us for our work and helping them address issues in their business, recognize the value we have created, smile, shake our hands, and do nothing.

See things have changed.  Regardless how compelling our value proposition, how great the business case, how much the functional or departmental executives may argue for our solution; executives aren’t finding the money.  More than ever before, executives are investing only in things that directly impact their strategic priorities — and it’s only their top strategic priorities.

All companies have long lists of things they’d like to do.  Great business cases for improvements, new processes, new approaches, areas to grow and expand, new products to develop.  But investments are only being made in the top 2-3 priorities.  If your project doesn’t fall into one of these priorities, you aren’t going to get the order.  You may have made the sale–the customer has chosen you as the solution they would like to implement, but you are not going to get the order unless you are in the top 2-3 priorities.

What do we do?

It’s a tough question–there are some sales strategies we might look at, there are some business strategies executives in your company might consider.

The biggest problem in confronting this issue is our individual and corporate egos.  It’s hard to imagine not being important because what we do is so important to us.  It clouds our vision and our ability to recognize and address the problem.  But however important we think we are to our customers, our opinions don’t count!  Being important to the customer is the only thing that counts.   So we have to get our egos out of the way to recognize and address the problem.

What next?

Well a good start–probably the only start is finding out what’s important to our customers.  It’s not understanding their problems, but it’s understanding their strategic priorities.  What are the top two or three things they are struggling with?  What are the top two or three initiatives their executive are concerned with?  Until we know those, we have no hope of being important to our customers.

Once we understand those strategic initiatives–focus on the top 2-3.  How do we position what we sell to fall under one of those strategic initiatives?  It doesn’t mean we have to solve the whole problem–we just have to be able to take a bite out of it.  We have to be able to demonstrate that what we do helps them address one or more of their top 2-3 strategic initiatives.

Recently, I spoke to a very clever sales person.  She recognized that her solutions weren’t really important to her customer–that is, they were very important in a part of the organization, but at an executive level, where the investment decisions were being made, her solutions weren’t on their radar screens.  However, she learned that customer satisfaction was a top priority.  The customer was being pummelled in the markets with customer satisfaction issues.  Their competition was attacking them, customers were fleeing.  Customer satisfaction was the most critical issue the top executives were dealing with.  She and the department head–the person who really wanted to buy her solution developed a new strategy. 

They looked at how the solution would impact customer satisfaction.  It wasn’t something they normally focused on–primarily their solutions focused on internal operational efficiency, but she knew that wouldn’t sell.  The question they confronted was “How do we link what we are doing in this department to improving customer satisfaction?”  They were able to develop a case where they could show the solution contributed to the focus on customer satisfaction.  It didn’t make a big dent in the customer satisfaction issues the executives were facing, but it took a bite out of that problem.  That’s all they needed to get approval to go forward.

Do you know what your customers’ strategic initiatives are?  Do you know how you help your customer with those initiatives?  Until you can answer this, you are wasting your time and your customers’ time.

This needs to be part of the qualification criteria–not just yours, but the buyers you work with at the customer.  What you sell is important to someone at the customer.  They want to talk to you, they want you to help them solve their problems, they want you to help them think about their parts of the business differently.  They are eager for you to create value.  But if what you and they are doing doesn’t fit within the strategic priorities of the enterprise, if you can’t find a way to show the solution addresses one of more of the top 2-3 priorities, you are setting yourself and your customers up for failure.

It’s important for you and the customer to qualify the importance of what you are doing.  It’s a tough, but critical discussion.  Customers may not want to have it–their egos are involved as well.  It’s hard for them to understand their function may not be at the top of the hit parade of their executives.  But if we don’t have those discussions and mutually develop a strategy go be a part of what’s important, we’re wasting time.

But what if, however clever you may be, you just can’t find a way to be important?  You still have to sell, what do you do?  I’ll address that in an upcoming post.

(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. Buying Isn’t Important, It’s The Results Of Buying That Are Important!
2. How Important Are “Techniques” To Sales?
3. How Important Are Partnerships To Your Sales Strategies?

Win/Loss Analysis is critical in helping us improve our results.  But there are a couple of perspectives in win/loss analysis I think are important in driving performance improvement and improving our ability to win — hopefully ultimately just doing win reviews

There are two different perspectives of wins and losses that I’d like to discuss.  One is the fairly typical win/loss review that should be conducted with every major opportunity–particularly for every major loss.  The other is a broader view of wins and losses–looking at overall trends and patterns across the broad number of opportunities.

Win/Loss Deal Reviews:

After each major win and especially after losses, we want to take some time to analyze the opportunity to understand why we won or lost.  We want to review our strategies, and how we executed the sales process:  What did we do well?  Where were we off target?  What do we need to change?  We want to consider:

• Was this the right opportunity for us to compete in?  Was in in our sweet spot?
• Were we working with the right people in the customer?  Were we covering everyone appropriately, did we understand their decision making process?
• Did we understand what they were trying to achieve?  Did we understand their goals?  Did we understand the business impacts of the problems they were trying to address?
• Was our solution responsive to their needs?  Did the customer tell us that?  Did the customer believe we really could solve their problem?  Where did the customer feel we were superior?  Where did the customer feel we were inferior or deficient?
• Did we understand the alternatives the customer was considering?  Did we reposition ourselves effectively?  Did the competition do a better job?
• Did we have a differentiated and superior value proposition that was meaningful to the customer and that they bought?  Were we deficient in any areas?  Were we differentiated from the customer’s point of view?
• Did we have a justified solution that met or exceeded all the customer objectives, and did we demonstrate the business case to the customer’s satisfaction?
• What would we have changed about our approach?  What might we have done better?

Ideally, particuarly for losses, we will interview the customer to understand the decision they made, and what we might have done differently.

These reviews are great learning vehicles–for sales people individually and for our organization.  We learn how we can continue to improve–both in how we sell, but our products and services.

 Win/Loss Trends:

This is a broader review of wins and losses.  It doesn’t focus on specific deals but looks to identify systemic performance issues.  It allows us to look at organizational issues and trends, rather than the specifics of a deal.  It enables us to better assess our overall effectiveness.  I like to look at wins and losses over a number of years to see if there are any trends that we can learn from.  For example:

• What’s our win rate overall?  Is it consistent, is it improving?
• What’s our average transaction value–both for all the deals we compete in, but also for the deals we win?  Can we see trends, is there a difference between the average value for the deals we win and the deals we compete for?  Are we good at winning the small deals but we can’t win the big deals?  A similar analysis around sales cycle time is good.
• Do we tend to win more with certain types of customers or certain types of solutions or products?
• Do certain teams seem to win more than others?
• What’s the volume of deals that we compete for look like? Is it appropriate to support our goals, do we see any trends?
• Are there certain competitors that we have greater difficulty in competing with?
• Do we see trends in the reasons for winning or losing?
• Do we have difficulties in certain parts of the sales process?
• Are there certain things we do in the sales process that cause us to win more often?  Are there things we are skipping that cause us to lose more often?

Understanding and Improving:

Win/Loss review have to focus on learning and improvement.  We can gain a lot–as individual, teams, and organizations to learn where we do well, where we do poorly, and how we can improve.  Understanding at both a micro–deal by deal, and macro level—overall patterns and trends, can give us great insight and improve our ability to compete.

Too many organizations conduct win loss reviews for the wrong reason—to assign blame.  We learn nothing from this.  We lose the chance to improve.  Focusing on blame is a waste of time and resource.

Are you looking at your wins and losses from both a micro and macro point of view?

Related posts:

1. Performance Management Friday — Activity Measures
2. Performance Management Friday — Funnel Balance
3. Performance Management Friday — Wallet Share

I’ve been writing this series of posts on metrics, and how sales people and managers leverage metrics to help maximize our performance for a number of months.  I’ve never written about Quota measurements–the “grand-daddy” of all sales measurements.  Part of the reason is that it’s something that’s pretty well understood (or so I thought), the other is that it’s a trailing or historic metric.  It’s difficult to use on a day to day or week to week basis to monitor and improve our performance.

I thought I’d write about Quota for a couple reasons.  As we approach the Fiscal Year End for many businesses, people are consumed with getting those last minute sales (some customer are consumed with spending money they might have left over–kind of serendipidous.)  Also, there’s an important aspect about Quota too many sales people overlook.

Quota is usually measured in Revenue or Orders.  Often, we may have multiple quotas, they may include certain product line quotas, customer or account, or some other measure.  Historic measures tell us what we have done, how we have performed, but they aren’t helpful on a day to day basis.  By the time we find out that we are under performing, it’s difficult to do anything about fixing it.  For example, if we are really off in our quarterly Quota performance, it may take us more than a Quarter to fix it.  That’s why we want to look at leading measures that are tightly linked to historic or trailing measures.  For example, we know the number, quality, and flow of deals in our pipelines is closely tied to Quota performance, so that’s why we spend a lot of time on funnel/pipeline metrics.  If we don’t have enough deals, we aren’t going to make our Quota—so we prospect for new deals.

But salespeople lose track of something important about Quota.  Quota is about jobs!

“Well duuuhhh Dave, tell me something I don’t know.”

Yes, we all know our jobs are at risk.  Fail to make Quota for a long enough period of time, and you find yourself looking for a new job.  But there’s something equally important, that sales people don’t think about (not unusual, because we usually think about ourselves).

Quota attainment is about the people in our company–ultimately the people in the entire supply chain, and their ability to keep their jobs.  We don’t bring in the orders, factories get shut down.  Engineers and product people are laid off, marketing budgets are cut, the list goes on. 

Too often, as sales people, we live in our own worlds.  We forget that if we fail to achieve our objectives, that has a ripple effect through the rest of the organization.  If we aren’t generating revenue, managers have to reduce spending to a level that is supported by the revenue that’s being produced.

In a large organization, sales people can “hide.”  There can be the mentality, “My quota is just a small part of the overall quota or the sales goal of the company.  It can be made up by other sales people in the organization.”  There’s some truth to that, but you get enough sales people doing that, there’s a significant shortfall.

In smaller organizations there’s no hiding.  Don’t make your quota, you start seeing empty cubicles around you. 

The funny thing, is often sales people can survive bad performance longer than the other people in the company can survive sales people’s bad performance.  So often, other people go before a bad sales person goes.

The global economy is struggling.  There are some bright spots, but there are lots of troubled spots.  We get upset with our elected leaders and other prominent people for not providing the leadership to help the economy recover.

Yet sales people are in a unique position–we can contribute to the recovery.  We can contribute to keeping and creating jobs, albeit in a small way.

There is no magic, if customers aren’t buying they aren’t buying.  But perhaps we can go that extra step to help create reasons to buy.  We can show them something they haven’t thought of before.  We can show them new opportunities or ways they can improve their business—helping them grow and improve their revenue (you can see where I am going).

Sometimes we do everything we possibly can, but we just can’t create the sales.  I get that.  I look at top sales professionals–they are constantly stretching doing everything they can, making no excuses.  They know they are working not only for their own job, but to grow the company.

But then there are the rest.  They complain about the thing the company is doing to them, they whine about what they don’t have, they are busy, they are “trying,” but they aren’t producing results.  It’s never their fault, but it’s the stupid customer, the bad products, or something else.  They worry about themselves, and are blind to their impact on other people’s jobs.  They work for themselves–not realizing they are working for other in the company.

Over the Holidays and New Year, we have a chance to regroup and think about what we need to do in 2012.  Perhaps if each sales person started thinking about their own “economic recovery program,” collectively we might have an impact on the recovery.

For those readers celebrating the Holidays, Best Wishes To You And Your Families!

Related posts:

1. Does Success Blind Us To The Real Opportunity?
2. In Winning, It’s The Little Performance Differences That Count
3. No Grin-F#!?ing Allowed!

I’m writing this with some trepidation, I worry that my message will be misunderstood or used by poor sales people as an excuse.  With that as a disclaimer, there’s real value in losing—but we have to take the time and extract the value that losing provides us.

We never want to enter any sales situation to lose it.  We have to compete vigorously, doing everything we possibly can to win!  It’s our job, it’s what makes us successful, and it’s what professional sales people live for.

However, recently, I was engaged in a conversation with someone claiming his organization’s win rate was in excess of 99% (let’s put aside definitional issues, under virtually every definition, 99+% is very high).  My immediate reaction was, “That’s too bad, it must mean you  are missing lots of opportunities.”

Winning is great, but we really don’t learn much from winning.  We don’t learn where we can do better.  We don’t learn what we are missing, We don’t learn how to stretch ourselves to achieve more.  Winning too much means we are playing it safe–we aren’t taking risks.

There’s a danger in winning too much, we become arrogant, we become blind, we stop listening, we stop improving, we start believing we are unbeatable, we get comfortable and complacent.  Ultimately, we set ourselves up not just for losing, but for massive failure.

Losing is tremendously powerful.  The problem is too often we don’t take advantage this power.  It’s through losing that we really learn.  If we’ve lost because we have stretched ourselves, if we have tried something new, if we have pushed ourselves outside our comfort zone–either trying something new with our customers, going after new markets and new customers.

Losing is the most powerful way of learning something new–but we have to take the time to understand and learn.  We have to apply what we have learned to winning the next time.  Losing shows us where we can improve, how we can grow.  Winning can never teach us those lessons.

Wasting the opportunity to learn and grow through losing is just wasteful–it’s a failure in your personal professionalism or of management.

Losing isn’t something we try to do.  We shouldn’t make excuses when we lose, but we take the opportunity to learn, grow and move forward.

Related posts:

1. In Winning, It’s The Little Performance Differences That Count
2. Why Didn’t You Buy From Me?
3. Earning Our Way — No More Excuses!

We’ve spent a lot of time nurturing the customer.  We’ve discussed their business strategies, problems, opportunities.  We’ve presented case studies to show the results they might expect from our solutions.  We’ve gotten them to think differently about their business, we’ve done our best in consultative selling.

The customer is excited about the potential, they assemble their buying team, they start defining what they want to achieve, they start discussing what they want to do, evaluating options and alternatives.  We continue to work along side them, drilling into their business, refining our solutions, presenting a business justified solution.

But things start bogging down, they slow, then they stall.  A decision that seemed to be in our grasp all of a sudden becomes more threatened.  We’ve done everything we can, we’ve responded to all their requests, we’ve presented a compelling business case, but the customer still won’t move forward.  How do we get them to make a decision?

Too often, we and our customers start in the buying process in the right place—we’re both focused on a problem or an opportunity for the customer.  We’re aligned with the customer, we want to help them resolve the problem or capitalize on the opportunity.  We are focused on business results, on the things the customer will achieve from implementing a solution, and the great value our solution brings over that of the competition.

Things are moving ahead, then all of a sudden things stall.  The customer gets caught up in the minutiae of buying–as good consultative sales people we get sucked down that death spiral with them.  All of a sudden, there’s a lot of focus on  the act of buying, the transaction.  It’s actually a fairly natural occurrence.  Good people wanting to “dot the i’s, cross the t’s” lose site of why they were buying in the first place.  They become so task focused, they forget what they were trying to achieve.   The “deal” moves from the results the customer wants to achieve to a focus on the transaction.

I’ve seen customers trapped in the endless minutiae of the act of buying, deferring or losing much of the value of what they are trying to achieve.  Recently, I looked at a deal with a client whose customer had gotten so bogged down in the “analysis,” they lost the window of opportunity for what they were trying to do.  Because their business was a seasonal business and they couldn’t make a decision in time, they lost the opportunity to drive significant revenue increase this season—-they’d have to wait a full year to get that value (which meant my client lost the opportunity to get the sale this year.  I was asked to intervene on a deal where the customer had selected a vendor, but was so consumed in achieving a 3% (less than $10K) savings in the purchase price of a product, that they forgot they were deferring millions of dollars of revenue —an opportunity to increase revenue by several percent in the 4th quarter had been lost.

Customer lose their way in the buying process.  If we aren’t providing them leadership, we’ll get lost with them.  We and the customer can never forget, the objective is not to buy, the objective is to get the results of buying.  We have to constantly remind cusotmers to put things in the right context.  Are they getting caught up in details that are significant to the outcomes expected, or have they lost sight of what they are trying to achieve?

As sales professionals we want to facilitate the customer buying process, but more importantly we want to facilitate their ability to attain the results that caused them to consider buying in the first place.  Don’t you forget that, don’t let your customer forget that!

Related posts:

1. To Get Monstrous Results, Are Our Customers Prepared For Monstrous Change?
2. Our Customers Need To Do A Better Job Of Buying!
3. Is Your Customer Buying What You Are Selling?

I work with dozens of organizations and hundreds to thousands of business professionals every year.  Over time, I’ve noticed some important differences in the focus of many of these people and organizations.  Some (too many) focus on avoiding failure, some focus on achieving success.

Aren’t they the same?  They actually can’t be more different.  We frame our view of the world in very different ways, pose questions in different ways. develop very different strategies, take different risks.

When your focus in on achieving success, you sometimes fail.  But you learn from that failure, you apply those lessons to achieving success.

When your focus is on avoiding failure, you sometimes fail.  If you are smart, you apply those lessons to avoiding future failures.  But you miss something important, you don’t kearn how to achieve success.  Sometimes your focus on avoiding failure blinds you to what success looks like.

We all fail.  What we do with it depends on our focus.  We can focus on avoiding failure, or we can focus on achieving success.

What’s your focus?

Related posts:

1. Stop Wishful Thinking —- Focus On Executing Your Strategies And Business Plans!
2. Focus Until It Hurts! Then Focus More!
3. The Difference Between Good And Great

One of the most important roles of the sales professional is to remove obstacles to the customer’s buying process.  It’s a role that has always existed, but too often, we forget about it, focusing instead on presenting our products and solutions,  or trying to persuade them to buy our stuff.   Providing information, responding to customer questions, trying to convince them are really insufficient — both for our success as sales people and for the success of our customers.

As sales people, we are trying to manage our sales process, aligning with the customer’s buying process.  Ideally, we are moving through the buying/selling process, synchronizing what we do, ultimately culminating in a decision.  Ideally, the customer and we are aligned around a sense of urgency and timing for a decision to But too often, things get derailed or slow down.  The customer has other things that come up, they shift their attention from making a buying decision, to other crises.  Sales people asking for the status of their decision, we want to provide them more information, we want to persuade or convince them that we have a superior solution, we want to get the order.

No amount of information or persuasion will solve this.  Until we have identified the obstacles and developed a strategy to remove the obstacle, the deal won’t go forward.  The obstacles could be internal to the customer.  They could be having trouble getting aligned around making a decision, they could be having difficulty getting internal approvals, they may have shifted priorities.

There may be obstacles the customer has with our solution.  They may not understand it, they may not believe our claims, they may believe other alternatives are better.

It’s the sales person’s job to identify and remove the obstacles—whatever they are.  We have to constantly be asking ourselves, “What’s standing between us and a customer decision?”  “What are the things we can do to remove those obstacles, facilitating the ability for the customer to make a decision?”

We can wait–perhaps the customer will discover and resolve these obstacles —- sometime.  Or maybe the competition will discover and resolve those obstacles, but will we get the order?

Or we can wait, and someday, maybe there will be a decision, or maybe there won’t be………

Related posts:

1. Selling Is The Easy Part, It’s The Buying That’s Difficult
2. Our Customers Need To Do A Better Job Of Buying!
3. The Illusion Of Control