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.

I have to admit, I’m writing this out of a little bit of frustration.  I have a prospect, it’s virtually impossible to communicate with them — at least through the normal channels.  Now, you may say, “Dave, don’t you get it–they don’t want to talk to you!”  But they really do want to talk and communicate with me.  They say so, they get upset when it appears that I’m not communicating with them.

They originally contacted me a couple of months ago.  I got an email from a mid level executive in the company.  He wanted some information, I responded–rather than doing a simple reply, I wrote a new email, using his email address, and sent it.  30 seconds later, I get it bounced back, saying it is undeliverable.  I call the guy on his mobile, apologizing and explaining the problem to him.  He groans and say, it’s our security system.  You can’t send emails to us, we can only send you emails.  It’s best for you to email me at my personal email.  I’ve been using his personal email to send him emails, he always responds from his company email.

As I’ve met other executives in the company, the same thing happens.  They can send me emails, but the only way I can communicate back is to respond to their personal email.  Now whenever I meet someone new, it’s one of the first pieces of information I get.

I tried calling one of the executives once.  I didn’t have his mobile number, so I called the office switchboard.  I did the “spell the name” thing, the response was, “No one by that name works here.”  I was surprised, I called someone else to get the story.  “Oh, we have trouble keeping our name directory updated (The person I had tried to reach had been with the company over 3 years.).  He gave me the guy’s mobile number and his extension for future reference.

Recently, I met with the management team.  We talked about a project and got a lot done.  At the end of the meeting, I said, “I have another topic I’d like to talk about.”  I went on to describe the email and telephone problem.  They chuckled, looked at each other sheepishly, and said, “Yeah, it’s a real pain.  We just work around it, you’ve figured it out too.”

I looked at them and said, “What if I were a customer or a prospect?”  The room went silent for five minutes.

I’ll stop the story here.  It sounds outlandish, but it is–was–true.  Perhaps that was part of their sales growth problem.  While that was an extreme case, consciously or unconsciously, too often we make it impossible for our customers to reach us.  We may steer them through a specific channel.  This company had a form at their website, that someone was supposed to fill out and submit—but what if your customers don’t feel like filling out a form.

There’s another example, this time I was the customer.  I was trying to buy a pretty significant piece of software for our company.  I had made the purchase decision, but then I had to buy.  The sales rep presented me with a 27 page contract.  It covered all sorts of things.  Then there were the forms I had to fill out.  Not only the normal credit information, but information about each user of the system, all sorts or unnecessary information about our company—I think it was for the marketing people.

I had my lawyer look at the contract.  It was OK, though it was so long and poorly worded, it just took time for both my lawyer and I to go through.  On the other information, I called the rep.  I said, I’ll give you the credit information, but nothing else.  You want the order, make it happen!

Often the only differentiator we may have is how easy we are to do business with.  Selling is hard enough, but if we make it difficult for those who do want to buy, then we’ve made it much more difficult.

Are you easy to do business with?  Look at your phone systems, look at your email systems.  Do you have guidelines for responses to phone and email queries?  What about your contracts and all the other things needed from those who have made the decision to buy?  Are you making it easy for them?  Finally, when there is a problem, does the customer know how to get it resolved?  Are there people that own the responsibility for solving the problem?  Is it clear, simple, easy?

These days, so many of the conversations among sales professionals and pundits is about challenging our customers, about getting them to think differently, about creating superior and differentiated value.  I talk and write about it a lot, as do many others. 

Sometimes, when I sit back and re-read what I write, or some of what others write, I get the impression that what we challenge ourselves and all sales professionals to do is the functional equivalent of “solving world peace.”  Sometimes we make the process of challenging, changing the conversation or creating value just too complex (I guess that’s what keeps many consultants and trainers employed).

In reality, our differentiated value only has to be “Just Good Enough.”  It has to be better than the competitors or the alternatives, but it doesn’t need to be earthshaking.  It’s probably valuable for us to start thinking of simplifying the process–it makes it more achievable for each of us and better for our customers as well.

Let’s look at some examples.

Often, I’ve stated, that we have to create “Value” in every interchange with the customer.  This doesn’t mean we have to solve complex problems, or have the customer have a giant “Aha moment” in each call.  The test for creating value in every interchange is if the customer can say, “That was a good investment of my time!”  We may not have shared any great insight, we may not have shown the customer how they could save millions, it is just as simple as the customer saying, “You used my time well.”  They might say “I learned something new,”  or “I had never thought of things that way,” or “You were able to confirm that I am on the right track,” or “Thank you for listening and hearing me.” 

In a time when customers avoid seeing sales people because sales people waste their time, the greatest thing that sets us apart is the customer that can say “That was a good investment” in my time.  Over a customer buying cycle, if all else is roughly equal, the sales person that makes the best use of the customer’s time through their whole process will be the sales person that wins!

Sometimes the value that sets us apart is making things simpler for the customer.  We are overwhelmed with complexity and difficult choices.  Sometimes the greatest value we can create is to make things simpler for the customer.  It could be being the easiest to do business with, it could be taking a problem off the customer’s hands and helping them, it could be being dependable–doing what we said we would do. 

We can create tremendous opportunities and value for our customers.  We can provide profound improvements in their business, help them identify and seize new opportunities, find ways to dramatically increase revenue or profitability.  Our competitors are also trying to do the same thing.

Often the greatest value is just simplifying things.  Often, it’s just using their time well.  Value can be created and aggregated by dozens of small acts, when taken together are just good enough.  Just the differentiation we need to be better than the alternatives.

It’s all the little things that count.  Pay attention to them, use your customers’s time well, make their lives siimpler.  If everything else is roughly equal, these become the margin of victory.

My colleague Anthony Iannarino wrote an outstanding post:   “Mismatched Skills And Value Creation.”  Usually, Anthony and I are so aligned in our thinking that we tend to complete each other’s sentences.  But I had to disagree with part of his post, it was the perspective he presented on Commodity Buyers.

Virtually every product and service, at some time in it’s life cycle moves to commoditization.  As differences between offerings become smaller; as buyer familiarity with the products, solutions becomes greater; as perceived risks to the purchase decision become much smaller; then there is the potential that our offerings become commoditized.  Given no other differentiation, the only way to win is based on price  — or is it?

Don’t get me wrong, there are people that will always buy on price–regardless of whether our product has significant differentiation or it is a commodity.  Price is important to every decision.

But as sales people, I think it is incumbent on us—both for our success and the customer’s to always focus on value creation and to aggressively seek to create value in every situation. 

Value can be created with commodity buyers–it’s just different than what we may have seen before.  While commodity buyers may be driven by price, they are also seeking other things–they may want to have an easy, painless, hassle free, procurement process.  They may want to look at reducing the overall cost of the transaction–not just the price. 

As an example, a number of years ago, I worked with the Chief Procurement Officer of a very large procurement organization.  They were responsible for procuring everything from basic chemicals, office supplies, “nuts and bolts” (literally), to complex computer systems, communications systems, development tools, machine tools and thousands of other items.  They managed billions of dollars in “spend” every year.  When we started to analyze their procurement processes, we started seeing very surprising data in the “costs of procurement,” or the costs of doing a transaction.  In some cases, the costs of procurement started to approach the purchase value of the items being procured.  Clearly, they had a problem that reducing the price of the commodities they were buying would not solve.

Some of their really smart suppliers recognized this as a problem.  They started working with the customer in seeing how they could reduce the cost of procurement.  Clever vendors realized there was value they could create in helping the customer reduce these costs–while still maintaining superior (but competitive) pricing.

Procurement organizations are very sophisticated–they are shifting to be strategic sourcing organizations.  They realize there is more to “save”  than just on price negotiations.  Supply chain management, vendor managed inventories, contract simplification and management all become critical elements of value that can be created for “commoditized products.”  In their book, Challenger Sale, Dixon and Adamson cite the example of W.W. Grainger challenging their customers on their process of procuring commoditized products. 

There are hundreds of other examples.  Indeed, some of the best thinking of creating value that I have encountered is from organizations who sell commoditized, undifferentiated products.  The sales person who sells carbon black and commands a superior price has to think about value creation differently.  The sales person that sells commoditized electronic components needs to be innovative in how they create value.  Sometimes those of us who sell more “complex or differentiated solutions,” are a little lazy about value creation–we still can rely on the differentiation of our solutions.

As sales people we have to be leaders, for our customers and with our organizations.  We have to constantly focus on value creation–in every sales situation.  Value can be found and created everywhere.  It’s our responsibility–not the customer’s, to create, communicate, and deliver that value.  We cannot succumb to the commiditization of our offerings — even if they are commodities. 

If we allow ourselves to be commoditized, if we allow ourselves to stop searching for and creating value, then we deserve the outcomes we create.

Are you constantly looking to Create Value?

(For extra credit, as you think about this, study and learn about Strategic Sourcing.  Go talk to the top sourcing and procurement executives in your customers and understand what they are trying to achieve.  They are hungry for value, you just have to learn how you can create value for them!)

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?

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?

One of the key roles of any leader or executive is to teach, coach, develop our people.  Our people are all too eager to learn from our experience, to learn what we did to be successful, as well as to learn what mistakes we may have made, so they can avoid them.

“Teaching,” whether formally or through coaching or mentoring is a privilege for any executive.  It’s a powerful way, not only to work on specific skills development, but to pass along values, to build the culture, to provide our people a broader context in which to position their contributions.  In growing our people, it’s our number one responsibility.

But often, we forget another key component of teaching/coaching/mentoring our people.  We forget the tremendous value we get in learning from them.

Today, I’ve been carrying on a couple of email conversations.  One with a sales manager in the Far East, another with a sales person in the Midwest.  With each, it became clear a telephone conversation would be valuable.  But each was reluctant to ask me to invest some time in it–not sure if there was a “business outcome” for me.  While I appreciate their sensitivity to my revenue generation, I told each, that I really value these conversations and learn a lot from them.  Each was overly humble in replying, “I can’t possibly imagine what you can learn from me.”

Learning–whether it is formal or through coaching or mentoring is really two ways.  I know what I can share as a sales executive or consultant — what people, whether they are sales people in my organization or clients, can learn from me.  But the value we get from them teaching us can never be over-stated.

It’s an opportunity for any executive to learn what’s really happening in the organization and the world.  We get the privilege to talk to people who are struggling to implement our strategies, to achieve the goals we have set, and who help make us successful.  We get an unfiltered view of what’s really happening–not the sterile numbers or text that may be in a report, but the context, emotions, and color commentary on what’s really happening.

We get much more than that.  For example, in the email conversations I was having with these two individuals, they were asking questions differently than had been posed before.  Each was asking about prospecting, demand generation, and sales process, but they expressed the questions a little differently–the questions were challenging and caused me to really think about my response.  They gave me the opportunity to look at what I thought I already knew, but to look at it a little differently.

The questions didn’t cause me to change my mind or point of view.  They didn’t create an “A-HA” moment, but they caused me to reflect and think about the appropriate response.  They forced me to consider something I thought I knew, but from a slightly different point of view.  It was something I could learn from.

Often, it’s the naive questions we may get from our subordinates.  We tend to think everyone understands things the same way we do, that just because it’s something we “get,” that everyone else does as well.  Then you encounter a sincere, but naive question, that causes you to sit back and realize you’ve been alone, that others simply may not get it.

Or, like any human being, we beome blind.  We don’t see what everyone else sees, we become a little disconnected from what’s really happening.  The questions and discussions with our subordinates or people deep in our organization are often a giant wake up call–but only if we are open to learning.

I, along with others, write often about how critical it is for executives and leaders to teach, coach, and mentor their people.  Almost always, we focus on the importance of it in developing our people and helping them perform at the highest levels.

One of the greatest values of teaching, coaching, and mentoring is what we learn from the person we are coaching.  It helps us grow and to perform at even higher levels.  When you are coaching, don’t cheat yourself of the opportunity to learn from those who you are coaching—that may be where the greatest value lies.

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.

I sit in hundreds of review sessions every year.  Pipeline reviews, territory reviews, account reviews, opportunity reviews, call reviews.  An odd thing happens in about 90% of the reviews, they all become deal reviews.

Think about the last pipeline review you participated in.  It starts out with a review of the pipeline, pretty soon, someone–perhaps the manager, perhaps a participant, perhaps the sales person doing the review, focuses on a particular deal.  All of a sudden the conversation shifts and becomes a deal review.  Seldom do we get back to reviewing the pipeline, if we do, it’s only for a moment.  Soon another deal is highlighted and we get into another deal review.

The same thing happens in account or territory reviews.  We start talking about the account or territory plan, and within a few minutes, a deal pops up and we shift our focus to a deal.

I see this in review session after review session.  We start with one type of review and soon the review shifts to talking about deals.  It’s no wonder, as sales people or managers we’re continually focused on doing deals–chasing opportunities.  It’s natural that we shift, almost unconsciously into deal reviews.  We end up never completing the review we had intended.

Deal reviews are important–we want to look at what it takes to win, how we can maximize the deal profitability, how we can reduce the sales cycle.  We all gravitate to talking about deals.

But we can’t overlook territory, pipeline, account, and call reviews.  These are important–each serves a different function, each important to achieving our goals.

Reviews serve two important purposes–both for the manager and sales person.  First, they help us manage the business.  They help us understand what’s happening, whether we are going to achieve our goals, or to identify problems or obstacles.  The review process is a powerful coaching opportunity.  Managers need to leverage these reviews to help develop their people, sales people need the coaching, help, insight to help improve their performance.

Each review has a different focus and objective.

Deal reviews:  We spend a lot of time on deal reviews–rightfully so, this is where we spend most of our time.  The objectives of a deal review are to determine how we maximize our probability of winning, how we compress the cycle, how we maximize deal profitability.  As managers or sales people, we want to make sure we are positioned to win, that we are aligned with our customers, creating the greatest value possible.

Pipeline reviews:  Funnel or pipeline reviews are critical.  They enable us to look at all the all the deals we are pursuing.  Do we have enough deals to achieve our quotas?  Do we have good flow through the funnel?  Is anything getting stuck?  Are we feeding enough new deals into the top of the funnel?  Are there systemic things that impact our effectiveness.  A pipeline review looks at the overall state of the business, not at specific deals.

Account review:  In any account, we may have many things going on.  Lot of deals, projects, extending our relationships into new parts of the account.  An account review focuses on all aspects of the account.  In some cases, it is similar to a pipeline review–we may want to look at the number and quality of deals we are pursuing.  The account review also represents an a prospecting plan.  What are we doing to expand our relationships in the account, how do we leverage these activities to identify more opportunities to pursue.  An account review allows us to focus on the quality of our relationship—are we maximizing our value to the customer, are we important to the customer?  It allows us to look at is the customer good for us, are we maximizing the profitability of the customer.  It allows us to look at the strategic relationship we want to have with the customer.

Territory reviews:  Territory reviews are similar to account reviews, but rather than focusing on a particular account, we look at the territory.  Are we maximizing our penetration of the territory?  Where are there new opportunities?  What can we do to maximize our share of the territory.

Call reviews:  Call reviews are very closely tied to deal reviews.  We execute our deal strategy by making calls.  In a call review, we want to debrief a particular call.  In addition to the “to-dos” and next steps in the sales process, we want to take the time to assess our effectiveness in the call.  Did we accomplish everything we had planned?  Could we have accomplished more?  Is there anything we would have changes?  What did we learn and how do we apply it to future calls.  The problem with call reviews is usually we focus on the “to-dos” and miss the opportunity to discuss our impact and effectiveness.

Each of the types of reviews is very important to managing our effectiveness, performance, and impact.  We need to do each–generally we do deal and call reviews quite frequently, every week.  Pipeline/funnel reviews–unless you have very short sales cycles, don’t need to be conducted as frequently.  Territory and Account reviews–unless there’s a lot of change, usually need to be done once a quarter, sometimes even less.

To maximize the value of each review–keep focused on what you are trying to achieve in the review.  The temptation is always to talk about deals, but unless you are doing opportunity reviews, you need to focus on what you are trying to achieve in the review process.

The other day, Charlie Green, Anthony Iannarino , and I had a discussion on handling the competition.  Charlie posed the question, “Is it ever appropriate to bash the competition.”  It was an interesting discussion, and I thought it worthwhile to share some ideas here.

We all want to compete as aggressively as possible, OutPerforming the competition.  Generally, we want to focus on building our strengths–what separates us from the competitors, why we create greater value, why the customer would be better off by selection our solutions.

Sometimes, however, I talk to sales people who seem to want to bash the competition–rather than focusing on why their own solution is superior, they tend to want to do everything they can to knock the competition.  They talk about the deficiencies in the competition’s products, they talk about how bad the solution or the company is.  They focus on all that’s wrong with the competitors.

Frankly, that’s a strategy for losers.  In my experience, it does more to reduce your own positioning, than it does to weaken the competitors.’  Here’s why:

First, by bashing the competition, you are doing exactly what you don’t want to do.  You are removing the focus from your solution and placing the focus–and the customer’s–on the competition.  A better strategy is to keep the customer focused on your solution.  Keep them focused on what makes you different, your superior value.  Get them to see you as the benchmark of excellence that the competition must strive to achieve.

Second, bashing the competition, criticizing their solution, their capabilities their ability to perform put your credibility at risk—making you appear stupid and ill informed.  The competition will ALWAYS know the capabilities and the performance of their solutions better than you.  Any claims you make about them can be easily disproved by them—eroding your credibility and making you a fool.  The customer should be thinking, “If he was this wrong on what the competition can do, where else has he made stupid and wrong statements?”  If your competitors want to bash you and demonstrate their stupidity, then by all means let them.  Let them force the customer to come to you and pay attention to you, let them give you the chance to show how wrong they are and give the customer an accurate and informed position about your capabilities.

Third, bashing the competition, focusing on what’s wrong will cause the customer to start to ask similar questions about you and your solution.  Continued focus on negatives creates the excuse of the customer to search for or create negatives about you.  We never want to shift the customer’s focus from our strengths to our weaknesses–don’t give them an excuse to do this by bashing the competition.

Finally, bashing the competitor runs the risk of making the customer feel stupid.  In the least it demonstrates your lack of respect for the customer.   After all, there is something about the competition that interests the customer, causing them to want to consider them.  You are better served by trying to understand that—ask the customer what they like about the competition, why they are considering them.  Listen, probe to understand.  Now you know what’s interesting to the customer, you have the chance of coming back to present what you do and why you may have the superior solution–all without threatening the customer or making them feel foolish or defensive.

We need to compete vigorously, but always by keeping the focus on ourselves, what makes use different and what value we create.  We can compete, we can talk about differences, but we are more effective when we keep the focus on ourselves and what we do, rather than bashing the competition on their approach.  In talking about differences, it’s always far more powerful to position them in terms like:

• “We chose to do these things with our solution, rather than doing what the competitor does, because we believed our customers would get superior results because of ……”
• “Our approach is different from the competitor’s because our customers have told us these things are important to them.  We wanted to make sure we were addressing issues most important to you and our other customers….”
• “We’ve adopted these policies or practices because we think doing things in this way is better for you because of these reasons…..”

Make sure the customer knows why your company has chosen to do things a certain way, differing from the competition and then make sure they know what’s in it for them.  Make sure they understand your rationale and strategies, that they buy them, and that they use them to challenge the competition with, “Why don’t you do it that way?”

Bashing the competition is a losing strategy. let your competition choose that strategy if they are foolish enough.  Keep the focus on what you do, why you do it, what it means to the customers, and why it should be the benchmark against which the customer evaluates alternatives.  You keep the customer focused on you, your strengths and differentiation.