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.

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?

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?

There has been an important revolution in marketing thinking over the past years.  The move from thinking about campaigns to rich content programs and nurturing is important.  It recognizes something important, that customers want to learn, they want to be educated.  These programs enable us to develop “relationships” with customers and nurture them up to the point of their deciding they need to take action and start a buying process.

In our nurturing programs, we design them to have the customer take different actions through the program that help us gauge their level of interest, their urgency, and their readiness to buy.

This is important and needs to be the cornerstone of our marketing programs.  But there is a problem with this–it requires a customer to have an interest–to want to learn–to want to consider a change, to be thinking about their needs.  Not necessarily to do something today, but to be thinking, “perhaps we need to change at some point in the future, I should start learning and looking around now.”  In essence, nurturing works best when the customer raises their hand.

But what happens when the customer should be raising their hand, but isn’t?  What about the case where the customer is so busy just surviving day to day?  What about the customer that isn’t looking to learn, that isn’t thinking about the future, who isn’t thinking about how they might improve their business?

They may never be a part of our nurturing programs because they don’t recognize the need to be nurtured.  They may be part of our programs, but they aren’t taking the actions they should be taking—but aren’t.

Pull is an important part of developing the customer need, knowledge and enabling us to enter a buying cycle when decide they need to buy.  But I think push is still critical.  But it’s push in a very different sense.  It’s helping the customer recognize that they need to change.  It’s helping them understand they are missing an opportunity.  It’s helping them understand that them see new ways of running their business or function.

Sales people must bring ideas to their cusotmers!  Sales people must provoke and challenge their customers.  Sales people must create the reasons for customers to raise their hands, to say–I need to do something now–entering into a buying process.  Alternatively, to say–that’s something I need to start looking into.  I might want to do something later.

I get concerned as I start to see the sales pendulum swinging to “pull” oriented sales strategies.  I think exclusively relying on pull–which I see many organizations seriously considering is irresponsible.  It’s not because we “aren’t” driving our sales growth as aggressively as possible–though that is irresponsible.  But it’s really irresponsible because we see that our customers are missing opportunities to grow and improve and we aren’t taking action to help them understand this.  It’s irresponsible because our customers often look to their sales people for ideas–to understand things that are happening in their markets, best practices for their functions, how to be more efficient.

We have to help our customers understand new opportunities–if we are truly customer focused, value based, trusted advisors, we need to get them to raise their hands.  Our nurturing programs may not do this.

Creating great value for the customer, developing meaningful relationships requires a careful balance of push and pull.  They can’t exist by themselves–we can’t have push only strategies, nor can we have pull only strategies.  We have to purposefully execute both.

Related posts:

1. The Importance Of Push And Pull In Sales
2. Who Owns The Customer?
3. Moving From Customer Acquisiton To Customer Engagement

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

The other day Seth Godin offered a short post on Sold or Bought.  It offered an interesting perspective, but he didn’t go far enough on selling.  We can further refine this view in a number of ways.  One of the major splits I see is sales people who are really order takers versus solution creators.

Order takers focus on their product.  They can be very customer service oriented.  But the quality of their interaction is very different from a solution creator.  In prospecting, they call the customer asking about their use of widgets, their satisfaction with their current widgets and whether they need new widgets.

When they find a customer who needs a widget, they are very good about providing the customer all the information about their widget and why it’s better than other widgets.  They can even read through their lists of features and benefits.  They ask the customer if they have any questions about the capabilities of their widget.

They can be very customer oriented and very polite.  After they answer the customer’s questions, they ask for the order.  The customer probably isn’t ready, so they call them back a few days or a week later and ask, “How are things going?  Do you have any more questions about our widget?  I’m delighted to answer any questions you might have about our widget.  When do you think you will be making a decision?”

Then they wait.  They forecast it in closing, they say the order will come in any day now, and they wait.

They call a week later, “How are things going? Do you have any more questions about our widget? I’m delighted to answer any questions you might have about our widget. When do you think you will be making a decision?”

Then they wait. They slip the close date another few weeks or a month.

Then they call again…..

I see order takers in all industries, selling all kinds of things–products, services.  They could be big ticket items.  Order takers worry about their order and are oblivious to what the customer is trying to achieve.

Solution Creators are different.  They’re idea people, they’re results people–not just for themselves but for the customer.  They help their customers envision a new future.  They help their customers think about their business differently.  They help their customer change and improve.

When they prospect, they never ask about their needs and requirements for widgets.  They talk to the customer about what they are trying to achieve.  They present ideas, “Have you ever considered what might happen if you did this…..?”  They analyze the customer and say, “Do you realize if you did this, you might improve this much in these areas?” 

When they engage the customer they talk about what the customer is trying to achieve.  They don’t spend a lot of time on what their solution does, it’s features or capabilities.  They know it’s not about the product but what the customer is trying to achieve.  Instead they focus on outcomes and results the customer will achieve.  They quantify these results, so the customer can clearly understand the impact it will have on their business.

They create a sense of excitement and urgency in the customer to change.  When the customer slows down, they refocus the customer on opportunity costs, on what they are missing by delaying a decision and implementation.  They focus on when the customer will achieve results, not when they will get the order. (But they know when the order has to come in for the customer to achieve the results in the desired time frame).

They don’t compete on features, advantages and benefits because they know they rarely lose because of a feature.  Instead the focus on results the customer will achieve.  They focus the customer on achieving those results and not whether they are missing a certain feature.

Order takers are being threatened with extinction.  Prospects and customers can get information about products elsewhere.  They can get answers to their questions in other ways, without the annoyance of someone constantly asking for an order.  The value order takers used to create is no longer needed because customers and prospects have more efficient means of getting that information.

Solution creators are treasured.  Customers need ideas.  They are often so busy, they are blind to opportunities to improve.  Customers welcome solution creators because they create value.

Things are bought and sold.

There are order takers and solution creators.

Which are you?  How do you know?

Related posts:

1. How Did You Arrive At This Perception Of Our Solution?
2. After You Ask For The Order, Don’t Forget To Get It!
3. Relationships Don’t Get You The Order!

There is an interesting discussion on Focus on transforming sales organizations from Push to Pull.  I can see the reason for the discussion, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a comment about “pushy sales people,” I’d have a huge pile of nickels.  It’s also both fashionable and realistic to talk about the customer’s buying process.  Customers are in the driver seat, social business can provide customers a lot of information that sales people previously provided.  Marketing is developing rich content strategies to nurture and develop relationships with customers–theoretically enabling them to “pull” when they have a need.

There are a lot of important changes that enable us to engage customers in different and more impactful ways.  However, with all that said, I remain an unabashed proponent of the sales person’s obligation to Push!  I don’t believe sales can afford to be Pulled–in fact it’s irresponsible to be Pull only.

The problem is sales people (and businesses) have always gotten the notion of Pushing wrong.  It’s always been focused on the wrong thing:  What’s our elevator pitch?  Let’s go pitch our product!  I need to get this order now!  It’s been almost exclusively focused on the sales person, the sales person’s goals and the sales person’s company.  It should be clear why customers react so poorly to this, it’s not about them.

Push is important, it’s the obligation of sales people–but it must be correctly focused.  It has to be about the customer.  It has to be focused on them and what they can achieve.  It’s the obligation of the sales person to help their customers think differently about their businesses, to discover new opportunities, to discover opportunities to improve–operations, customer satisfaction, quality. profitability, reduce risk, or whatever.  Customers are sometimes buried in the day to day, losing perspective about opportunities to grow their businesses.  Often, as prisoners of their own experiences, they don’t realize that they might try something new, there might be a different or better way that improves their results.

Whether it’s called “Challenging,” “Provocative,” “Solutions Oriented,” or “Customer Focused,”  top sales people bring new ideas and opportunities to their customer.  They create a vision and engage their customers in owning the vision.

Push doesn’t stop there, it continues through the buying process, helping the customer engage the right people, structure their process, and make a decision.  Great sales people help the customer keep focused on the goals they are trying to achieve.  As the buying decision stretches out–as it often does, the great sales person pushes the customer–helping them realize the lost opportunities and opportunity costs of delaying the decision and implementation.  The objective is not the order, but helping the customer achieve their goals on as aggressive a schedule as possible.

Push is critical, push is important–but only if it is focused on the customer and pushing them to achieve their goals.

But Pull plays an important role in supporting Push.  Pull is a measure of customer ownership  and engagement in the opportunity, and the business result.  If the sales person has done the right job in Pushing, all of a sudden the customer starts to Pull.  They embrace the initiative, they get actively engaged in the opportunity and in owning the results.

Great sales people look for their customer to Pull as a result of their appropriate Pushing.  By itself, Pushing can be slow, but if the sales person can get the customer engaged in Pulling as well, the entire process gets accelerated.

A Pull only strategy is the kiss of death for sales people.  However powerful our customer nurturing and development programs, if we wait for the customer to Pull, we are in a seriously disadvantaged position.  The customer has already done their research and arrived at some decisions.  They have evaluated alternatives (correctly or incorrectly) and narrowed alternatives to a short list.  At this point the value the sales person can create is seriously constrained–primarily to responding to the customer need.  At this point, too often, the difference between alternatives is very small–often leaving the key differentiator to be price.

Pull is bad for the customer, as well.  It puts too much responsibility on them.  They probably can never be a knowledgeable in solutions as the people who build those solutions.  While there is a wealth of information in the web, the customer in their research may emerge informed, but not well informed.  They may emerge mis-informed.  Pull is even worse from another perpective–it puts the onus of recognizing opportunities on them–they may miss opportunities, or be late in recognizing them.  Customers get great value from others making them aware, challenging them, Pushing them.

Push and Pull, artfully combined is the winning formula for the customer and for sales.  They work well with each other, but to my mind, it all starts with a little Push.

What do you think?

Related posts:

1. No Sales Model Is Forever, What To Do When What Worked Isn’t Working
2. Strategic Thinking, Getting The Big Picture
3. Sales Professional 3.0

We constantly get it wrong, as sales people we focus on our products and what we are selling.  As “sophisticated” sales people, we wrap some nice language around it and focus on the solution we sell, hiding the fact that we are focused on selling a product. 

The real problem is we are focused on selling.  Our customers should be focused on buying, but they really aren’t, they’re focused on solving problems or addressing opportunities.  Most of our customers’ difficulty in solving problems or addressing opportunities has nothing to do with the solution.   But, again, that’s what we focus on.

Here’s what our customers are struggling with:

• Recognizing there’s a problem or opportunity.  There’s a lot of talk about Challenger Selling.  This is where Challengers shine, helping customers recognize there is a problem or opportunity, helping them explore things they may have never considered.
• Understanding the magnitude/impact of the problem or opportunity.  There is are consequence to everything.  Money being lost, deals being lost, customers being lost, operational inefficiencies, new revenue opportunities, new growth opportunities, new markets.  All of these have some sort of value or impact to the organization.  Something that impacts the top or bottom line.  Customers may recognize they have a problem or opportunity, but may not know–or may lose site of the impact.  Sometimes they are blind, sometimes, like the frog in a pot of hot water, they have become so accustomed to something, they forget there’s something better to do.  Great sales people help customers discover this—and keep customers focused on addressing this through the sales cycle.  Customers forget, they get caught up in the act of buying, forgetting what they were trying to achieve.  Without sales constantly mainting this focus, deals get off track.  They slow down, they drag on.
• Deciding they want to do something about it.  Everyday, we live with problems, somehow they’re not important enough for us to do something about them.  Likewise, we forego opportunities, perhaps because we have too much on our plates.  The reality is there are too many problems and too many opportunities for our customers to address, some they live with, some they forego.  Even though the customer recognizes these and their impact, nothing happens until the situation becomes intolerable.  Individuals and organizations don’t have the capacity to solve more than a few things or address a few opportunities at a time.  Deciding to do something and getting it to the top of their priorities is critical.  It can’t be something the customer wants to do, it must be something the customer must do.  Our job as sales people is to get the customer to decide they want to do something and get it to the top of their hit parade.
• Socializing the issues within the organization, gaining support for taking action.  It’s very seldom our customer acts on their own–even at the very top of the organization.  Other people need to be involved in the decision and the implementation.  Identifying everyone that needs to be involved, engaging them in the process, getting alignment around the definition of the problem or opportunity, getting everyone to have ownership and a sense of urgency around taking action is critical.
• Gaining the support of executive management to invest in solving the problem or address the opportunity.  There’s no such thing as a free lunch–actually nothing’s free.  Solving problems addressing opportunities require investment on the part of the customer.  It’s not just money—though that is often a big part of it, but it’s time, resources.  It involves choices, of all the investments that can be made, which will the executives choose and which will they fore go or defer.  Unless we are dealing at the very top of the organization, many of our customer don’t recognize this must be done or don’t know how to do it.  They invest a lot of their time and our time, take the request forward, only to have it rejected.  Often they’re fearful of going to executive management, they don’t want to look bad, they don’t want to fail.  Here’s where the sales person can really help, making the customer recognize the importance of executive support, building it from the beginning and maintaining it through the whole process.  Helping them develop their arguments and become comfortable in presenting to senior management, helping them to persuade and “sell” their idea are areas where sales people create great value—after all, that’s what we are supposed to be really good at.  Even at the executive level, helping them understand the investments in addressing these problems or opportunities is critical–that funding and resources must be made available.
• Choosing among alternative solutions.  This can be very tough, there are lots of great alternatives.  It’s difficult to differentiate between many solutions, or any could be equally good.  Which enables the customer to achieve their goals most quickly, at the lowest risk, maximizing the return on their total investment (not the price of the product they are buying).  This is our sweet spot, this is where we focus, this is what we have been trained to do. 
• Making it work, achieving the results.  The easy part is the buying—and that’s complicated enough.  The customer still has all the hard work of producing the results, of making things work.  By now, the sales person has accepted the PO, collected their commission and walked away.  The sales person’s job does not stop with the PO.  It only stops when the customer has achieved their goals.  This doesn’t mean the sales person does the work, but the sales person must be accountable for assuring the customer achieves success.  Without this, they will never be a reference, they will never buy again.

As sales people, we focus tend to focus on the smallest and easiest part of what the customer is trying to do—choosing among alternative solutions.  If we really want to make things happen, if we really want to maximize our ability to win, our value to the customer, and our differentiation, the job is much bigger.

Are you stepping up to it?  Are you doing your real job?  Or are you just providing data so they can make a selection?

Related posts:

1. Buying Isn’t Important, It’s The Results Of Buying That Are Important!
2. Let’s Put An End To Product Training!
3. Are Your People Selling What They’re Supposed To Sell?