Let’s face it, customers really hate us.  They will tolerate our marketing content—as long as it isn’t too promotional—just the facts please.  Sales people, well that’s another story, we’re really a total waste of their time, unless the are looking for lunch or a golf game.  With the exception of the lunch and golf game, the web now can solve virtually all our customer problems.  Customers can find peers, other people who have the same interests, concerns, problems.  “Trusted sources,” that can provide much” higher quality information and insight” about vendor products than the we can.  Our role as suppliers is now to sit politely by the phone, wait for it to ring, then answer any remaining specific questions the customer may have, process their order (if we are fortunate enough to be the supplier selected), smile and thank them for their business.

Our buyers are so fortunate.  We know all that information is totally accurate.  We know those users or people who have experience know everything there is to know about our products and services, and how they apply specifically to the problems other companies have.  We know these are totally without agenda (or even being compensated).

We also know that our customers know exactly what they are looking for.  We know they have all the right questions and just need answers.  We know they know how to solve their problems, so they are just looking for data and information.  We know they have the time, ability, and judgement to invest in searching the web, engage in conversations with people they have never met, talk about their proprietary information and problems.  Imagine a web based conversation, “Our manufacturing process really sucks, we have too much scrap, bad quality, and poor customer satisfaction and are looking to reduce those problems…in your experience, what are the best solutions to that?”  Or “Our financial systems are a mess, we can’t close our books, we don’t know if we are properly reporting our results, if we are in compliance with government regulations…. what have you done to solve that problem?”

Yes the web is the answer to our customer prayers.  We need to transform our organizations to better serve our customers and to more effectively process those orders.  We need to spend more time encouraging our current customers to spend less time doing their jobs and more time participating in web based forums, maybe we can even provide them some copy they can use in their discussions.  (Perhaps this is the role for all the displaced marketing and sales people).

Frankly, I am getting PISSED OFF with all the apologists for sales and marketing.  I’m angry with all those naive enough to think that marketing and sales can bring no value or insight to our customers and they should be displaced by web based forums.  Finally, I am terrified for our customers who may not even recognize they have a problem or may be so busy just surviving they can’t spend the time solving their problems.

Sure, we deserve much of the criticism that is leveled at marketing and sales.  Every day, we are bombarded with an ever escalating volume of messages, promotional content, and stupid sales pitches.  Too many organizations seem to see the solution to this move to the web is to turn up the volume.  This only serves to piss customers off, rather than turning up the volume, we need to turn up the quality and customer experience.

If we can’t turn up the quality of the customer engagement, if we can turn up the quality of the customer experience, if we cannot offer real insight and value to our customers, then the web is probably the best solution.

But I think too much of our customers to succumb to that.  I think too much of our companies and shareholders to to succumb to this.  I think too much of the value we as sales and marketing professionals can offer to succumb to that.  We have to change and we are changing.  We have a huge amount to offer to our customer and can create real value.  We can provide our customers insight they can’t get anywhere else.  We walk the halls, visit the plants, talk to lots of people in our customers.  We see new possibilities, we see opportunities to help them grow and improve.  We can offer help and advice, we can create real meaning in helping them outPerform their competitors and better serving their customers.

If we aren’t prepared to change, we deserve what we get — but that’s always been true, the web hasn’t changed any of that.

Let’s stop apologizing for our professions, let’s not abandon our responsibilities to our customers, our companies, and ourselves to create great value.  It’s not time to give up, it’s time to get more aggressive in the changes we have to make in ourselves and how we engage our customers.

The human brain is an awesome instrument!  One of the things it enables us to do, sometimes almost unconsciously, is to instantly recognize patterns.  We encounter a situation, in nano seconds, our brains compare the situation with others we have encountered through our life.  It quickly enables us to recognize, “I’ve encountered something like this before—-this is how I recognized it, this is what I did, this is what happened as a result.”  We do it thousands of times a day, comparing everything we have encountered, looking for common patterns that have produced successful outcomes, then acting based on our experience of those patterns.

Top performers take this even further.  They move pattern recognition from the unconscious to the conscious.  They constantly compare the characteristics of what they are encountering to their experiences in the past.  They understand the characteristics or variables that are most critical to what they are trying to achieve, they assess the actions they should take based on those characteristics.  They also assess what’s different about these patterns and can quickly adjust what they do based on their past experience and the assessment of the current situation.

People who have mastered something–say a top athlete, musician, someone who has invested the 10,000 hours experts say is required for mastery have thousands of patterns built up in their brains, they have the ability to quickly assess situations they encounter, match that with the most appropriate patterns from their past experience and quickly act.  This capability is often called “muscle memory” or “instinct,” but is really the result of the brain’s tremendous pattern recognition, pattern processing capabilities.

Top performers in sales do the same thing.  They have patterns built up, based on their experience.  They are quickly able to evaluate a customer and just “know” the right way to deal with that customer.  They encounter a sales opportunity and are able to assess it against their past experience, leveraging that experience to develop and execute winning strategies.  Top sales people constantly seek to replicate that experience—find customer that fit the past patterns of success, find situations and opportunities that match the most successful opportunities from the past, and leverage that experience to be successful in these current situations.

When you speak to top sales performers about this, they can precisely describe what they look for (the patterns) and how those patterns influence their activities.  When you watch them in action, they are constantly looking for those situations that match the patterns of past success.  In fact, what they are describing is their personal sales process—the things they look for, the things they do, the responses they expect based on what they have experienced in the past.

The sales process–when taken from an individual level to and organizational level is really the collection of all those past patterns of success.  It is based on the collective experiences and collective patterns of top performers and what has made them successful.  The sales process becomes a “template” or a pattern that all other sales people can leverage to increase their success.  In some sense, it’s a shortcut to the 10,000 hours to mastery, because you are able to leverage the collective “10,000 hours” of all the top performers.

Do you recognize the patterns of your own past successes in sales?  Are you able to leverage them to improve your own personal effectiveness?

Are you leveraging the collective experiences and successes of everyone in the sales organization to contribute to your personal success–you can’t be doing this if your organization doesn’t have a sales process, or you aren’t using it?

Do you constantly update your sales process, based on the new patterns of success you see?

Every year, I sit through hundreds of deal reviews.  They all seem to go the same way.  The sales person talks about the deal, the competition, what the sales person or team has done.  Too often, too much time is spent reviewing and discussing past history.  However, at some point in the review, the discussion shifts to, “What do we do next?”

Often, there’s a bit of an uncomfortable silence.  Then a lot of random ideas start surfacing, “We should probably meet with…..,”  “Maybe we should do this……, “  “Let’s do a demo…..,” “Let’s have one of our executives call on them…..,” “What if we tried this…..”

I’m always struck by the seeming randomness of the discussion.  Lots of brainstorming, lots of (and some very good) ideas, but they sometimes seem unfocused or like we are grasping at straws struggling to identify the critical next steps in improving our positioning, and moving to winning a deal.

There’s simply no reason for this.  There’s no reason to be guessing, there’s no reason for the randomness in thinking.  The next steps must always be purposeful and have a strong direction.  They must be based on our experience in winning deals, knowing what’s most effective in producing results, and how we win.

Guess what, the tool that we use to do this, executing our best practices consistently is the Sales Process.  The sales process provides direction and context to our discussion on what’s next.  While the specifics will vary deal by deal, the Sales Process provides a structure and framework that’s based on our best practices and knowledge of what wins.

The conversations that are random brainstorming sessions, the confused discussions about what to do next are the result of not having a Sales Process–or not using it.  In the absence of a sales process, we have to “invent” a way to win each time every time.  We have to invent it continuously as the customer executes their buying process.  We aren’t leveraging our experience of what it takes to win, so we put our ability to win at greater risk.

One of the best things about a Sales Process is it provides a structure and a framework that helps us win!  It helps us understand what it takes to win and provides us a starting point to answer the question, “What do we do next?”  Why not focus the next steps based on what we know causes us to win, rather than guessing?  Why not use the process as the starting point to identifying specifically what advances us–yest we have to adjust what we do to the specifics of the situation, but we do in a structured, efficient and effective context.

I don’t know about you, but somehow winning–and winning fast is important to me.  I can’t imagine having to guess.  I can’t imagine putting my ability to win at risk–in fact I want to minimize that risk.  I can’t imagine not leveraging our best practices to give me direction and insight into what to do next.  I can’t imagine not leveraging the Sales Process for it’s maximum impact.

Are you comfortable with guessing and putting your ability to win at risk?  If you are, then you don’t need a Sales Process.  If not, then the answer should be clear.

We all know the shifts in buying.  The web offers a tremendous resource to all of us.  There is an overhwelming amount of information available on virtually every topic.  There’s a lot of data that says customers don’t want to see sales people until later in their buying cycle–presumably the final phases, as they have developed a short list of alternatives.

Many think this is wonderful–certainly on the customer side they get to avoid all those terrible sales people.  From the sales side, we now get involved with really serious customers and our sales cycles can be much shorter.  So somehow people seem to think we create this terribly efficient buying and selling environment.  From the sales side, we shift our focus to high quality content, SEO, and all sorts of things that increase our visibility to customers who let their fingers wander their keyboards.

But you have to pause and wonder, is this really a good thing for customers and for sales?  Perhaps for simpler transactions, or where professional well informed buyers are invovled, this may be OK.  But in the world of complex B2B solutions, one really wonders.

What are the problems with self education?  Is it really the “right” thing for customers?  Perhaps this is an arrogant view, but as sales people are we fulfilling our responsibilities in creating great value for customers by succumbing to this self education/information?

Here are some of the challenges:

First, we all know that if something is on the web it must be 100% true, right?  This is the easiest concern, probably the majority of stuff on the web is wrong or out of date.  So how do our customers determine what’s good, what’s accurate, and what information they can rely on?  I suppose if you wander around enough, perhaps participate in discussion forums (but who knows who those people really are), we can sort through the piles of information– perhaps finding things that are more accurate than not.  Perhaps is we narrow our search to “trusted” suppliers, then we can feel more comfortable that we are getting accurate information — but how do we know who is to be trusted?  Just as with working with sales people, smart buyers need to be skeptical.

Second, “my problem is different.”  In complex business decisions, everyone has a different problem or need.  Yes, 80% of the requirements may be the same, but it’s the last 20% that really make the difference.  Companies are different, strategies, culture, priorities are different.  Their goals, objectives vary.  Their processes, history, legacy systems (in the broadest sense) are different.  That last 20% is probably the most critical to the success of any project the customer is undertaking.  Where are they going to get the answers specific to them, where are they going to get the answers specific to that critical 20%? 

Third, do they know what to look for?  Do they know what questions they should be  asking, what they should be researching?  This, to my mind is probably one of the most important concerns customers should have about self educating.  In the complex world of B2B solutions, knowing what questions to ask, what things they should be looking for, what things might be possible is critical.  How do customers know what they don’t know?  A CFO and her staff may be very knowledgeable about how they run the financial operations in their organization—but what do they know about buying a new financial system?  How many times have they bought financial systems in their careers?  What are the capabilities of these systems?  What should they be looking for and why?  How can they change their operations and processes to get much better results? 

We’r all prisoners of our experience.  We know what we know, we don’t know what we don’t know.  If we are self educating, we are constrained in our search to what we know and think we need to know.   Our ability to solve our problems is constrained by the quality of our questions.  Sure, we might stumble upon some interesting content on a web site, we might talk to people and learn new things we should be considering–but that takes a huge amount of time and can really be hit or miss.  Is this the most effective way to buy?  Is this the most effective way to drive tremendous improvements in our operations? 

Fourth, to the customers know how to buy?  Do they have the right people involved, do they know how to organize themselves, do they know how to align their objectives and put together a project plan to identify, select, and implement a solution?    After all, unless they are professional buyers or sourcing people, their jobs aren’t to buy (which, as a side note, is why we are seeing strategic sourcing being involved in more decisions where they haven’t had a presence in the past).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, do customers even recognize they have an opportunity to change, and opportunity to improve and grow?  Do they realize they are missing opportunities, or understand how they could seize them?  Simply put, from a sales point of view, we are being irresponsible in serving our customers.  Our job is to help customers identify new opportunities to improve, to grow.  We can’t let our customers cheat themselves of the opportunity to achieve their dreams.  We have to bring them new ideas and insight.

Self education and self directed learning works — after all, there has been great progress in distance based learning.  But the reason those programs work, is they have very clear objectives, very clear methods, and are well structured–not random.  Self education and self directed learning can be very effective in buying, but only in well structured and well defined environments, and in using trusted sources.  For certain types of purchases this is very effective.  But in complex B2B solutions and complex business problems, things are seldom so clearly defined.

One of the major roles of sales people has been to teach.  Too often, our teaching has been misdirected, we focus on teaching/pitching our products.  The greatest value we can create is to teach our customers about different ways of doing things, about new opportunities, about things they may not even realize.  We have to help our customers learn.  We have to help our customers understand the questions they should be asking.  We have to help our customers learn what they should research, what they should be looking for. 

It’s important that we have high quality content, that we continue to create great web/social presence.  But this is most impactful when we have an educated buyer, a buyer who knows the questions they should be asking, a buyer who knows what they should be looking for, a buyer that can critically evaluate the alternatives.

Are you prepared to teach your customers?  Not about your products, but about how they can improve their operations and businesses, how they can better serve their customers, how they can outperform their competition.

What are you doing to help your customers learn?  What are you doing to prepare yourself to teach?  What are you doing to prepare your customers to buy?

Truth be told, most sales people would prefer to have a root canal than prospect.  Sales people do deals—we love the engagement with a customer that wants to buy and is willing to give us an audience.  We love the adrenaline rush of competing in the final stages of the customer buying process, convincing the customer that we have the superior solution and can create the greatest value for the customer.  Then, it’s capped off by the customer calling us to let us know we got the deal!

In an ideal world, we would be blessed with never-ending qualified opportunities in our pipelines.  Marketing working it’s magic somehow produces great leads, we qualify virtually all of them, then get into doing deals.  Life would be wonderful!

Unfortunately, the real world is seldom like that.  Too often, we don’t have healthy funnels.  As much as we try to increase our win rates, as much as we try to cross sell to increase our average transaction size, most of the time there’s a great gap–we don’t have enough opportunities to pursue to make our number.  We may be successful, we may be closing deals–but that empties our funnels.  Unless we have new opportunities coming into the funnel, we won’t continue to make our numbers.

Ideally, marketing is creating enough demand to provide the continued flow of new opportunities.  But if, for whatever reason marketing can’t provide that flow of great leads, we still have to figure out how to make out number—that’s our obligation to our companies and to ourselves.  It is unacceptable to go to our managers saying, “I’ve closed every deal in my pipeline, now I just have to wait and twiddle my thumbs until marketing gives me good leads.”

If marketing can’t create a sufficient number of leads, then we have to go out to find them.  We have to go out and prospect.  Hopefully, there’s a willing audience–a list of people that are willing to sign up for our seminars.  Ideally, we can go back to past customers, seeing if they have new opportunities.  If they don’t have opportunities, ideally they will introduce us to people who do–they’ll actively refer and sponsor us to new people in their organizations or other companies.  Getting a referral or introduction is very powerful in helping us identify new opportunities and we should leverage them as much as possible.

But what if that doesn’t produce a sufficient volume of great leads that we can qualify and fill our funnels?  We are still obligated to achieve our goals—anything less is just excuses.

So we leverage indirect relationships.  We ask people in our companies if they know people we should be talking to, we ask friends, neighbors, maybe the person sitting on the bar stool next to us (though I’d be a little careful with those).  We leverage our connections in LinkedIn or Facebook.  We do everything we can to leverage even the most distant connections or relationships—”Did you know you are the third cousin of my next door neighbor’s high school buddy’s roommate in college?”

Any time we have anything we can leverage–a close relationship, a past relationship, a powerful referral, a distant relationship, whatever—we leverage those because it’s out job to find a sufficient number of opportunities to achieve our goals.

But what if we’ve exhausted all of those and we still have a gap in our pipelines–maybe not for today, but what about tomorrow?  We still have an obligation, a commitment to reach our goals.  We have to continue to look for new opportunities. We have to……. I’m hesitant to say…….  I guess I’m scraping the bottom…..  God forbid…..  but we have to cold call!

There, I said it, the dreaded words—”the cold call.”  Well actually, it’s the well researched call to someone we may not know and to whom we have no possible introduction.  We have to do the research and find a meaningful way to pick up the phone or email or show up in their office or whatever.  We have to find a way to engage theses “total strangers” and reach out to them with a well researched and prepared “cold call.”  And we have to do one, and another, and another…..

Cold calls are tough, they’re tough, they take a lot of work.  Clearly, if we can leverage anything else that is more effective, we’d be foolish not to.

As sales professionals we have an obligation–it’s our commitment to make our goals.  Again, in an ideal world, we have perpetually healthy pipelines and never have to prospect.  In a real world we have to prospect, we have to go out and find new opportunities.  We have all sorts of ways to do it, and we should choose the simplest and most efficient possible.  but if that doesn’t produce the right volume of opportunities we can’t stop there–we have to keep exploring, we have to keep searching, we have to find new opportunities.

When we have a gap in our ability to achieve our goals–today’s and tomorrow’s, it is irresponsible not to exhaust every single alternative in our prospecting efforts–there is simply no excuse.

Recently, I met with the executive team of a large consulting/systems integration company to discuss Sales Processes and why was critical for their organizations to have a sales process.  Before we started to discuss the sales process, we talked for some time about their business.  I asked, “What’s most critical to your success in delivering these complex IT projects to your customers?”

They all quickly responded, “It’s really two things, it’s the quality and experience of our people and it’s our project management approach.”  I asked them to talk about their project management approach.  They started to describe it with some precision.  They described critical success factors like:

Starting with the end in mind:  They worked with their customers to explicitly define the end goals and objectives, the target dates, what success looked like, how they would measure it, and so forth.

From this, they worked backwards from the end goals and target dates to determine what critical activities were required to achieve the goals, when they had to happen, who would be responsible for each, what the sequencing was, what the critical dependencies were and how they would measure their progress.

They went on to describe their project management process.  They had established a template they applied to every project.  It forced them to identify key milestones for each project, they were spaced through various phases of the project.  They said getting the customer on board with this project plan, and tracking to the milestones and objectives was what separated success and failure.

I asked them more about the process–naively, I thought it was just a generic process. but they said I was wrong.  They had built a process that was based on what made them successful.  They showed me critical milestones they had in their process.  They told me that based on their past experience — projects that have gone really well, those that had failed, they knew certain things were key to success.  They said if they didn’t do those, projects tended to get delays or problems would pop up.  They knew those things were critical to their success.

We talked a little bit more, I was struck that their process seemed to be ingrained in the way they approached the business.  They just seemed to naturally talk about what needed to be done, why.  They could look at projects that were at risk and quickly develop corrective action plans to resolve the problems.  One thing that struck me was they believed their process was a critical differentiator–their approach set them apart from their competition.  It was something they featured when they spoke to prospects.  It was a key tool to convincing their prospects they could do the project in a superior fashion, they would meet the goals and delivery dates the customer established.

In talking about how they sold, they said the project management process and the skills and experience of their people were critical differentiators in selling.

At that point, one of the executives started getting a little impatient, he said, “We’ve spent a lot of time talking about our project management process, but we’re here to talk about our selling process.  I’m not clear what it is, or why we need to have one.  Can you share your ideas about this?”

Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty savvy about reading signals and cues from prospects and customers, so I decided to switch gears and talk about the selling process, otherwise I might lose them.

So in responding to his query, I looked around the table, and said, “Well in a way we’ve been talking about the sales process already.  You should think about the sales process as a special application of a project management process.”

I paused and looked around the table—all of a sudden there was a different look in their eyes.  They suddenly got it–we didn’t have to go much further, other than discussing, how would develop the sales process.

Every company has project management processes–whether it’s how you deliver projects to customers, or how you complete projects within your organization—development projects, marketing projects, internal sales projects.  We know how to do project management.

If you are struggling with your sales process-think of it as a specialized case of project management.  It has a clear end goal and a target completion.  There are clear milestones–these might be the transition from prospect to qualified, from qualified to discovery, and so forth.  We know there are critical activities we must do based on our past experience.

If we understand project management, establishing the sales process is easy.

Recently I was in China in a series of meetings with CEO’s of Chinese companies.  The meetings were great, but we each struggled to maximize their impact.  My Mandarin is very limited–basically to “Hello,”  “Thank you,” and a couple of other words.  Many of the executives spoke some English and were very polite in trying to communicate in a way that I could understand.

Mostly we relied on an interpreter.  The problem was, the interpreter interpreted the discussion–that is he describe things based on how he heard them, not necessarily what was intended.  So we had to be very careful in what we were saying and in verifying that we were aligned in our discussions and what we were trying to achieve.  Fortunately, our shared intention allowed us to be effective in our meetings.

Often, when I go on sales calls with sales people, I think that we are speaking different languages.  The customer is speaking their language, the sales person is speaking their—and there is no interpreter.

Each of organization and industry have their own terminology, jargon, buzzwords, and shorthand.  We have ways of expressing things, that others may not understand.  Too often, I see sales people reeling off terms and acronyms–often to make them sound important, but meaningless to the customer.  Or sales people don’t take the time to understand and communicate in terms that are meaningful to the customer.

A very simple example–many years ago, I managed an organization whose key customer segments were automotive and aerospace design engineers.  Even though the design processes were very similar, the terminology used in each industry were profoundly different.  Automotive engineers tended to talk about “flow lines,”  aerospace engineers tended to talk about “aerodynamics.”  Same concepts, but if we used the term “flow line” with the aerospace guys, we would both lose credibility but we would lose the customer–they wouldn’t understand what we were talking about.

As sales people, we want to maximize our impact on the customer.  We want to make sure our customers understand us and that we understand the customer.  It’s not the customer’s job to speak our language—we have to speak the customer’s language.

This goes beyond the words we and our customers use.  Each industry has key processes, metrics, practices, business drivers.  These are ingrained in everything the customer does.  For us to be impactful, we have to understand all of these, what they mean to the customer and how we can impact them.

Do you understand your customer’s language?

Do you speak the customer’s language?

Do you understand the key metrics, processes, practices, and business drivers for your customer?

I received a frustrated email from a colleague the other day.  He described a sales situation—he’s selling a solution that creates a tremendous return for this customer.  The return is about 4 times the investment –  a business case that seems compelling on the surface.  But he’s frustrated because he can’t close the deal.

It’s actually a situation B2B sellers encounter quite frequently. We develop great business cases for “The Customer,”  a company or an enterprise.  But the reality often is, the value or the return accrues to one department or group, and all the cost and risk accrues to another group.  For example, in the case of my colleague, all the benefits accrued to an end user group.  The solution produced tremendous cost savings for a specific department.  The challenge, however, was all the expense, work, and risk was in the IT group  — and the IT Vice President simply was deciding not to make the investment.

Frankly, I side with the IT Vice President on this issue, his reluctance to agree to the solution is perfectly rational.  There was no value proposition for him, there was only cost, risk, and hassle.  One might argue that he should invest in this as a “good corporate citizen.”  But it’s a meaningless argument if it puts the attainment of his other goals and objectives at risk.  Why should he divert his resources and budget from a set of projects that he has committed to, and for which he and his organization are being measured?  Just because it’s a priority for one organization, is it a priority, is it more important than all the other initiatives the IT executive has on his plate.

This is a challenge to every B2B seller.  Too often we can create great business value for one group in an organization, but if all the stakeholder invovled aren’t aligned in the priority, if all the stakeholders don’t get value, then our deals get stalled.  And we are actually seeing this happening more and more in B2B sales.  Deals are getting stalled not because of the business case, but because the customer–the individuals, not the enterprise, aren’t aligned in their priorities.

There are a couple of challenges in these types of deal.  Consider:

How does the Vice President of IT get value out of this?  There are lots of ways to start addressing this–can the end user, getting all the benefit provide the funding/budget to the IT group so they can invest in this project and still meet their budget goals?  Can they get IT projects reprioritized so it is a top priority–by which IT is measured?  (Of course then there’s the risk of upsetting all those whose projects were deprioritized)

A great business case is insufficient to win.  Great value for the customer is not just value created and delivered to the enterprise, but value created and delivered to each stakeholder in the decision.  We can’t just create value for one and ignore the others, we have to have a compelling value proposition for everyone involved in the decision.  It’s our responsibility as sales people to make sure we understand what each individual values, and we that we align what we do with what each individual values.

This situation illustrates another major problem.  The most important stakeholder is probably the stakeholder who pays the bill—the stakeholder that has the greatest at risk in the decision.  The beneficiary of all the benefit — the customer we are selling to, may have only upside in the decision.  But the most important people are likely to be those that are paying the bill or have the most at risk.  We find this very frequently in IT project.  Much of the benefit accrues to the end user organization, all the risk, expense, hassle accrues to IT.  IT has to have a win in the decison to move forward.

Often, this problem is made more complex because many customers simply don’t know how to buy.  We may be working with a particular department or group of users.  We might get them excited and wanting to buy—but if other people need to be involved in the buying decision and aren’t, however much our “customers” want to buy, they just won’t.  Often, we have to help our customers know who should be involved in their buying decision and why.  Often we have to help them learn how to buy and organize themselves to buy.  In every sales situation, we need to assess the customer’s buying process–do they have one?  Are the right people involved?  Do they know how to buy, do they know how to make a purchase decision, and to they have all the people who are involved in that participating? 

There are very few complex B2B sales that don’t cross organizational boundaries.  If we are only selling to one buyer, we may win that buyer, but fail to get the order.  We have to sell to all the stakeholders. 

Finally, things have changed substantially in recent years.It used to be that if you created a compelling business case, the company would find the money to fund the project.  That’s no longer true.  Companies are being very selective in their investments, they aren’t investing in every project that has a great business case, they are only investing in projects the are aligned and directly contribute to the top 1-2 strategic priorities of the company.  Even if you have all the stakeholders aligned–if this specific project isn’t directly tied to the top 1-2 strategic priorities, the project will most likely not go forward regardless of how compelling the business case.

For each of your deals, consider:

• Are you selling to all the stakeholders?
• Is there compelling value to each one?
• Can you clearly state what’s in it for the person paying the bill or incurring the risk?
• Does your customer know how to buy and have they organized themselves to buy?
• Does your initiative directly contribute to the top 1-2 strategic initiatives in the organization?

You have to meet all these criteria to succeed.

A strong sales process is critical to our effectiveness as sales professionals.  Without a strong process, it’s comparable to an aimless walk—we may reach our destination, but then again we may not.  Or we may reach our destination after an overly long journey.

As much as has been written about sales processes, I am constantly amazed by the number of organization that either have no process in place, their process is hopelessly outdated, or the sales people and managers don’t use the process.  We can never achieve the highest levels of performance without a process.

So since our goal is to develop the sales process that maximizes our personal effectiveness as sales professional, I thought it useful to outline five conditions your sales process must satisfy to enable you to be best in class.  I’ve restricted this to five, I’m interested in differing views.  Have I chosen the right five or should a different five be selected? (Please, out of pure arbitrariness I’m restricting this to five.  So if you have a sixth or seventh, you have to eliminate some of the original items.)

Condition 1:  Your sales process must not only be aligned with the customers buying process, but it must enable you to help lead and facilitate the customer’s buying process.  Too often we’re glib in talking about the customer buying process, when we really are talking about our sales process.  But buyers rule.  Buying is very complex.  They have to organize themselves to recgnize a problem or opportunity.  They have to get people invovled, define their goals, define how they will make a decision, align themselves internally, and do all sorts of other things.  In the world of complex B2B solutions, customers don’t know how to buy, they may not know they should buy (that is they have an opportunity or a problem).  Sales demonstrates it’s leadership and creates great value by aligning everything they do with the customer buying process.  If your sales process doesn’t drive this kind of behavior in your sales people, go back to Go, do not collect $200 and start all over again.

Condition 2:  The sales process is for the sales people, not anyone else.  The sales process is focused on helping sales people develop and execute high impact sales strategies. It focuses on deals and how sales people win deals.  The sales process is not for sales managers—though managers must use the process in coaching their people, and can get tremendous insight into deals, pipelines, and performance; but all of that is icing on the cake.  Sales people have to be involved in the design and development of the sales process, after all it’s for them and they must own and execute it.  There is no reason to have a sales process other than making sales people more effective.  If your sales people aren’t the center of your focus in your sales process, Go To Jail!

Condition 3:  The sales process must help your sales people improve their ability to win.  It has to be based on your best experience–things your best sales people consistently do to win.  It is unique to your organization, not something generic to all sales people.  You win and lose for specific reasons, there are uniqe trigger events or activities, that dramatically improve your ability to win.  If your sales process is not based on your sales people’s own experience, deep analysis of why you win, why you lose, what events amplify your ability to win, tear it up and start all over again.

Condition 4:  Your sales process should help your sales people compress the sales cycle. We know that wandering aimlessly through the sale results in sales cycles that never end.  The sales process provides structure and focus to the activities sales people undertake.  Sales people should constantly be looking at each opportunity, identifying where they are in the sales process and seeking to compress the process as much as possible.  The salles process provides a framework for the sales person to look at the next steps or critical activities, they can analyze them, they can consider “How many can I accomplish in my next step with the customer?”  Managers in coaching sales people on their deals should look at this, helping the sales person understand where the cycle can be compressed.

Condition 5:  Your sales process must maximize your deal value or profitability.  I know those sales people and organizations whose sole strategy is to win on price don’t read my blogs.  There’s no skill in winning by price, there’s no value creation if you compete by being the lowest cost supplier (all other things equal).  So if you are reading this, you are interested in maximizing your deal value or profitability.  This means how you create value, how you communicate it, how you deliver it needs to be integral to your sales process.  It requires that your process focuses you on customers in your sweet spot, who demand and appreciate the value you create.  It demands that you can differentiate that value from the alternatives the customer is considering–if you can’t your only option is to win by price.

Does your sales process match all these criteria?  If it doesn’t, then you have a bad process.  You will never be able to maxmize the performance of each sales person, you will never maximize the performance of your team or organization.  It isn’t tough to design, your top performers already know it, though they may execute it unconsciously.

Does your sales process match some of the criteria?  Reassess it, tune it, improve it.  No sales process is forever.  How customers buy evolves, your value proposition and value creation evolves, competitors and customers raise the bar.  What worked a few years ago, may not be the most effective now?

If you don’t have a sales process, then you already know you aren’t performing at the highest levels possible.  In fact there is huge room for improvement!  Put together a team of your highest performers, lock them in a room for a couple of days, do some analysis. develop an initial cut of your process–making sure it satisfies all five conditions.  Roll it out, use it for six months, then tune it based on your experience.

If you have a good sales process in place and you aren’t using it, shame on you!  If you want to be a top performer, you have to use everything you can, you have to maximize your performance.  The sales process is the biggest lever a sales professional has to improving performance.

Do I have the right five?  I think so, but I’d love your views.  Remember, I’m arbitrary, I’m not interested in six, seven or more condition, I am only interested in the top five.  What are your thoughts?

I’m constantly amazed at the calls I get.  People calling me, with little idea about who I am, what I do, what my company does.  I see this from sophisticated people in large organizations to those people dialing for dollars.

Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not my ego speaking, but I’m a really easy person to research.  Do a Google query, a lot of stuff about me pops up to the top or near the top.  In LinkedIn, there’s a complete profile with links to my blog, my company’s web site, and twitter.  So it’s really easy to find out about me and to be prepared to engage me in a conversation.

I’m not alone.  It’s easy to get insight for virtually everyone — or at least their company.  A Google query, LinkedIn, Facebook–these are just starting points.

If we are trying to connect with our prospects, if we are trying to engage them or maximize the impact of each call we make, before you pick up the phone, do some basic research.  On every call I make, even to people I know very well, I have at least two screens open on my computer, the person’s LinkedIn profile and their company’s website.  With some, I may have other information available.  Having that insight at my fingertips enables me to accomplish more in each call.

The reverse works, as well.  When I get a call from someone I don’t know, I do two things–I bring up their LinkedIn profile and their company’s website.  I quickly skim them to get some measure of them and what they do.  It’s important to understand how credible they are.

Realize, the people you are calling are doing this with you.  If you don’t have a current LinkedIn profile, you are immediately disadvantaged.  If your company doesn’t have a web presence, you may be discounted as not credible.

Selling is tough!  It’s incumbent on every sales professional to be as prepared as possible.  When we get through to a prospect, we want to maximize our impact.  The more we know about the individuals and companies we call, the more effective we can be.  We want to be as credible as possible when we reach our prospects.  Our “social” presence and that of our prospects are critical tools to enhance our productivity and impact.

Before you pick up the phone, make sure you have your prospect’s LinkedIn profile and website in front of you.

When you get a call, immediately bring up the profile of the person who is calling and their company’s website.