I’ve been reading a lot of different stuff about coaching recently.  It’s good to see the different points of view, I learn something from each of them.  But in the end, sometimes I wonder if we are taking something that is already very tough and making it more complicated than it need be.

I read endless debates about who we should spend our time with, A’s, B’s, or C’s.  Everyone has a different view.  Some people even try to measure the optimal time spent coaching each person each week—it’s 15.23675899 minutes per person per week–OK I made that up, but you can find similar statistics in various posts.

There are lots of discussions about coaching approaches–directive, non-directive, and so forth.  Actually, I think these are very important discussions because they focus on maximizing the impact of each coaching discussion.  But some of them take the approach too far and are too formulaic, “use these words, with this emphasis, at this moment…”

In the end I’m more confused than I started (and I’m actually a pretty good coach).

I guess I subscribe to the KISS approach–Keep It Simple Stupid.  I like it because I can really relate with the Stupid part.

Here are some principles that have worked on me and for me.  Some will be helpful to you–by all means adapt them (send me royalty checks), for those that aren’t don’t worry about them.

1. The manager’s job is to get thing done through their people.  The only way we achieve our goals is through our people.  Our job then becomes maximizing the performance of our people.  Virtually everything else that manager’s do is supportive of this primary function.
2. If our job is to maximize the performance of our people, then coaching is the highest impact activity that we can engage in.  Sure there are things that help–training, systems, tools.  But coaching is where we as managers maximize our impact.
3. Everybody needs coaching–EVERYBODY, even you.  Make sure your manager is coaching you.  Coach the people who report to you, make sure everyone is coached.
4. Now for the first contradictory guideline.  This is in direct violation to 3.  Don’t waste your time on people who aren’t willing to be coached.  In fact, go one step further, get rid of them.  People who are willing to be coached aren’t willing to grow and improve.  Even if they are top performers today, tomorrow they’ll be dinosaurs.
5. Now we’ve reduced this to a simpler problem and we can re-invoke item 3, everyone needs to be coached.
6. Go where the problems are!  We tell our sales people to go where the money is, so likewise, if we want to maximize performance, go where the problems are.  This means we probably have greater impact by working with our C’s and B’s.  (But remember rule 3–and I’ll come back to A’s).
7. Spend whatever time it takes and is appropriate for the situation.  Sometimes great coaching is one or two questions/observations expressed in a casual hallway conversation.  There is no quota for coaching, 15.23675899 minutes per person per week is not the answer or the goal.  Having an impact on performance is the goal.  Do you coach A’s for 12.5267 minutes, B’s for 15.23675899 minutes and C’s for 4.237 minutes?  No, spend the time you have to–after all it’s the best way to use your time.
8. Every conversation and discussion is a coaching opportunity.  After a meeting, you have coaching opportunities, in a pipeline review, in a territory review, windshield time, in the hallway or drinking a cup of coffee (substitute the beverage of your choice).  We don’t schedule coaching sessions or meetings, we look for every conversation and interaction as an opportunity to coach.
9. Timeliness is key.  Coach when you see something happen if you want to have an impact.  Recalling that sales call 30 days ago where someone could have done something differently is a waste of everyone’s time.
10. In looking at 8 and 9, everyone needs coaching, everyone can sharpen their performance–so don’t forget your A’s.
11. Sometimes your best coaching for low performers is coaching them to move into a role where they can maximize their performance, where they can become A’s or B’s.  It may be a different sales role in the organization, it may be with another company.  C’s and low performers can’t be ignored.  You have to deal with them and you deal with them by coaching–improving their performance in their current jobs, or moving them into other roles–it’s part of what coaching is.
12. Here’s one for everyone, but it’s a way to really rocket A performers to even higher levels of contribution.  Remember you aren’t just maximizing current performance on the job, you are also maximizing the ability for them to achieve their full potential–maximizing their contribution over time to the company.  For example, you may be coaching some of your better performers to prepare them to step up to greater levels of responsibility–perhaps broader or different sales responsibilities, perhaps moving into management.  So we coach for both current performance and future performance.
13. When coaching, ask more questions than tell, listen more than you talk, probe and understand before leaping to conclusions, understand their point of view, be prepared to admit you are wrong.  Get them to think, get them to explore.
14. Here’s the second exception, sometimes the most appropriate coaching might be, “You really screwed that one up!”  In the right situation it is very powerful.  Sometimes telling is right–I’ll leave you to figure that out (or you can hire me to tell you).
15. Be human–no one is perfect, no one has all the answers. Sometimes shit happens.  Laugh!
16. Set an example, sometimes the best coaching is what they see you doing — and not doing.
17. Realize and revel in opportunities where your people may, in fact, be coaching you.  It’s subtle, it’s to be treasured.  It means they care.
18. The corollary to 17 is you have to care!  You have to care about your people as people, you have to care about their success.  If you don’t, you have no business being a manager, and you will never be successful as a coach.
19. Above all KISS.

 (If this isn’t enough for you, email me for our Coaching eBook., I’ll be glad to send it.  Just give me your full name and email address, send the request to me at dabrock@excellenc.com)

Related posts:

1. Who Should We Be Coaching?
2. Coaching And Being Coached
3. Initial Thoughts On Coaching Approaches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No related posts.

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

I’ve been reading a number of different posts on the topic of “Who Should We Be Coaching?”  There seem to be a variety of views, most of which I struggle with.  Some say focus on the middle, suggesting the return on coaching time for both high performers and low performers is not high.  Some focus on the high performers and middle.  In general the low performers lose out.

I’m struggling with some of the ideas, these ideas, frankly, I think it’s the manager’s job to be coaching everyone.  This doesn’t mean each person requires the same amount of time in coaching.  Nor does it mean we have a cookie cutter approach to coaching everyone on the same thing.

Also, I think too many people tend to view things as relatively static.  If competitive sales practices stood still and we didn’t need to improve or innovate, then perhaps we could reduce our coaching for top performers.  But things are always changing, everyone needs coaching and development to continue to improve and innovate.  Without this, top performers soon become mediocre performers.  The bar on selling is continually being raised.  In fact a large part of our job as managers is raising that bar–continuing to innovate and improve, consequently, helping our people develop new capabilities, skills and coaching them in these improvement initiatives.

It seems to me, that coaching needs to focus on several areas for each person:

• Top performers:  No one is perfect, top performers, in fact, always look for the little edge or the little improvement.  Managers need to spend time helping these top performers discover these improvements.  The world of selling never stops–leveraging your top performers for constant improvement and innovation is an important aspect of coaching–managers should be leveraging top performers to help innovate and improve, taking what these top performers discover and leveraging this across the sales organization.  Finally, part of the manager’s job is to coach people not only in maximizing their performance today, but to maximize their potential contribution in the future.  Manager’s need to look at developing top performers to take greater responsibility–whether it is moving to a higher level as a sales person, moving into management, or moving into some other role.  Coaching is not just about today, but it is about preparing people for tomorrow.
• Mid-range performers:  There’s no argument here, we want to see continued improvement in the performance of our mid range performers.  Unlike our top performers, there is clearly a need to improve what they are doing today.  As managers, most of our time will be focused on performance in their current roles.  At the same time, we must also prepare them for the future–if the bar is being raised, we have to prepare these people to meet these new challenges.
• Low performers:  We can’t afford to ignore them, we can’t write them off.  As managers, we need to coach them—getting them to improve their performance, meeting our expectations.  Alternatively, we have to move them into a job where they can be a top performer (sometimes that’s moving them out of the company).  All of this is part of the manager’s role in coaching, doing nothing is not an option, that is if the manager is doing her job.

As managers, we are responsible for the performance of all our people.  We have to make sure each person is performing at the highest levels possible in their current roles, we have to prepare them to grow in their job and to grow in their ability to contribute to the company.  If we can’t get them to reach the levels of performance required, we have to move them into areas where they can perform.  All of this is part of what managers do in coaching.

I wish it were simpler, but they aren’t.  Managers have to coach everyone.  The time we invest has to be appropriate for what we are trying to achieve with each person.  We can’t “schedule 15 minutes of coaching” for each person–it doesn’t work that way.  What we coach each person on is different–we have to coach to maximum impact for each individual.

What do you think?  Am I missing something?

Related posts:

1. Sales Coaching, Dirty Secrets Or Misunderstanding What Coaching Is About?
2. Coaching And Being Coached
3. Do You Trust Yourself And Your People Enough To Let Go?

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

Sales people are eternally optimistic–it’s a great strength of sales people and critical.  After all, we get a lot of “no’s,” if we let them stop us, we would never achieve anything.

Yet sometimes our optimism is our downfall.  We tend to accept things that fit “our picture,” not challenging them.  We tend to listen selectively, hearing what we want to hear, not necessarily hearing what is really being said.

I see this all the time.  I’m conducting a deal review, the salesperson reviews what’s going on, but something doesn’t ring right.  I often say, “this really doesn’t make sense, if I were in the customer’s shoes, I wouldn’t be doing this, why are they saying they will?”  Usually, the salesperson looks at me, there’s that look in their eyes, “why are you spoiling this for me, I really want to win this deal!”

We are driven to win deals, but we don’t help ourselves by deceiving ourselves.  If we hear only what we want to hear, we miss a lot–we miss what the customer’s real needs are, we miss their real problems, we misunderstand their decision making processes, we underestimate the competition.  It’s important for us to face reality in every sales situation–however good or bad.  Once we understand the real situation, then we can develop strategies to deal with what’s really happening.

We need to be somewhat skeptical of everything we hear or see.  Customers may not want to displease us, so they may not communicate as directly as we would want them to communicate.  It’s a natural human tendency–we want to avoid conflict or confrontation.  We don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings.  It causes all of us to adjust how we communicate–not intending to mislead someone, but just in trying to avoid unpleasant or difficult conversations.

As sales people, we make this worse by adding our own filters.  We dont’ want to hear bad things, we want the customer to be as enthusiastic about our solution and company as we are.  We want them to believe as strongly as we do.  We want to go back to our managers and peers to report how well things are going.

Healthy skepticism, some level of paranoia works!  We must continue to be cautious,  we must test ourselves:

• Does this really make sense?  If we were in our customers’ shoes, what would we do?
• Are we missing something?  Have we really probed the customer to understand what they are saying and what’s driving what they are saying?
• Have we asked the tough questions?  Are we really testing what we are hearing from the customer?
• Are there objections the customer should have, but aren’t articulating?
• Are we avoiding critical issues because we may be afraid of what the customers’ responses might be?

Make sure you really understand what’s going on in each deal.  Don’t let your optimism blind you.  What you don’t know, what you aren’t hearing can hurt you!

Related posts:

1. ARE YOU HARD OF HEARING? It Impacts Your Coaching
2. Did You Hear The One About 4 Blind Men And The Elephant?
3. Never Ask A Question If You Don’t Know The Answer

As sales people, we work with customers every day.  We see them, we’re in their offices, we talk to them.  They’re very real (sometimes too real) to us.  Customers–each of them—are very important to us.  Sometimes, it’s frustrating, people in our companies don’t seem to be as customer focused as we are.

Many of the people we work with aren’t as sensitive to customers as we are.  Part of it is they are busy doing their jobs, part of it may be they may not understand how what they do impacts the customer experience, part of it is simply that the customer is probably an abstract concept to them.

We talk about customers in our organizations all the time, but we refer to them as faceless entities, “General Motors,” “Bank Of America,” “IBM,” “Verizon,” or Company XYZ.  It’s hard for us to relate to an entity, but that’s how all of us tend to talk about customers.  These are entities without a personality.  We never talk about Bill, Sue, Joe, Lauren, Amir, or Deborah.  People within our companies don’t know how Robin is using our products and why they are important to her.  Or how the results produced through our services bailed Jim out, making him a hero to his customers.

It’s magic how people’s attitudes toward the customer change when they can put a face to the customer.  When the customer is transformed from an account or an entity to a real live human being, it’s hard not to be concerned with the customer.  When you know who the customer–the individual—is, what she looks like, what he’s responsible for, how our products help her do her job, the relationship changes.  It’s not a faceless entity, but an individual trying to do his or her job, trying to achieve their goals, trying to reach their dreams–and they need our products to do this.

Walk into a truly customer centric company and you see the “faces” of customers everywhere.  Their pictures and stories are in the halls, conference rooms are named after customers (individuals not entities), customers are invited to participate in meetings, there always seems to be a customer visiting and talking to people in the company.

In reviews and meetings, they talk about customers as people.  Rather than saying “we saw this when we visited XYZ Corp,”  customer centric companies say “Jill at XYZ Corp has a problem doing this, I’ve seen Dean at ABC, and Yuegang at DEF have the same issues….”  When we make decisions, we know the impact on Robert, Kelly, and Juan.

Want to be more customer focused?  Then put a face to your customers.  Rather than talking about corporations and entities, talk about people.  Celebrate the customer with pictures and stories in your halls and conference rooms, invite them to visit you.  Talk about them in your meetings.  You’ll be amazed at how attitudes change.

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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?