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  This is the easiest concern, probably the majority of stuff on the web is wrong or out of date.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?

I was struck by this comment from John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, “ We got knocked on our tail last year. Market transitions wait for no one. The ability to recognize and move on these is critical. If we don’t change, we won’t make it through these transitions and if you don’t change you won’t either. It’s happening at a faster pace in every industry.”

We all talk about how our customers are changing–what they do, how they buy, their expectations of suppliers is changing.  No business or individual can afford to stand still and survive.  Every organization is constantly string to innovate and improve.

This presents a special challenge for sales and marketing professionals.  Too often, we’re playing catch up–our customers are changing faster than we are.  We are still using our old techniques, approaches, and methods.  We’re marketing to them in the traditional ways.  Too often, we find our efforts are producing the results we need, our demand generation programs aren’t generating enough leads, we can’t get into customers to talk about their needs and requirements, our customers are leveraging the web and other sources to identify and narrow solution alternatives for their business.  We struggle to be relevant and create value for our customers.

But for many top sales and marketing professionals, this is a tremendous opportunity to provide leadership to our customers.   Imagine if we could help the customer recognize the transitions earlier–and help them take advantage of them.  What about helping customers create the transition?

“But Dave,” some of you might say, “the transitions Chambers speaks of are major structural changes in the world markets and economy, you can’t expect us to be driving those!”  In reality, they missed some major transitions as well as lots of smaller, more subtle transitions.  Cumulatively, they had a tremendous impact on Cisco, as they have had on many other organizations.

But I still maintain, “we” have the opportunity to help our customers anticipate and even drive transitions.  At an individual level, there are all sorts of things our customers may be blind to.  After all, too often, they are just caught up in the day to day.  They may not take the time to look around to see what’s happening to their customers, market, or with their competitors.  Or some of the things may just be beyond their experience base. 

We set ourselves apart by helping our customers recognize these transitions—by helping them understand what’s changing, how it might impact them, what they could achieve if they took advantage of the opportunity.

At a broader level, our companies should be providing leadership.  If the company is truly customer focused, we spend lots of time not just responding to our customers’ needs, but anticipating changes they may be facing and developing compelling solutions for them.  Product development people who look beyond our customers and their needs, to their customers and what they are doing. 

We and our customers can’t wait for the transitions and respond—we must anticipate, create and lead the transitions.  We must constantly be innovating.

When we see transitions happening around use–whether it’s to our customers or within our organizations, we can’t ignore them, we can’t resist them, we have to recognize them, embrace them and change.    There is no option, as Chambers says, “If we don’t change, we won’t make it through these transitions and if you don’t change you won’t either. It’s happening at a faster pace in every industry.”

As sales professionals and sales leaders, we are constantly focused on achieving the highest levels of performance.  We have to constantly improve–performance that was outstanding five years ago is deficient now.  What is outstanding today will become uncompetitive in the future.

Implementing performance improvement initiatives, continuing to improve and innovate is very difficult.  Sometimes, in looking at sales performance improvement, it’s important to break it into a couple of components:

• Are we being as effective as possible?
• Are we being as efficient as possible?

Sales effectiveness generally focuses on are we doing thing in the best possible way?  Are we doing things right?  We look at things like our sales process–is our sales process maximizing our ability to connect with our customers, to create value in their buying process and to maximize our ability to win?  Or we may look at our account/territory strategies—are we maximizing our contribution to the customer(s), are we aligned with their goals, helping them to achieve them, are we maximizing our share within the account or territory, are we identifying and pursuing every opportunity and maximizing our ability to win them?

Sales efficiency has a slightly different focus than sales effectiveness.  Typically it focuses on speed, time, resource.  Are we achieving our goals in the shortest time possible?  Can we reduce the time or resource required to execute our strategies and goals?  Can we reduce or compress sales cycles?

Effectiveness and efficiency go hand in hand when we are looking to achieve the highest levels of sales performance.  Doing things right–but at the wrong tempo doesn’t allow us to perform as well as possible.  Executing bad  processes in the shortest time possible doesn’t improve performance.

But sometimes, it’s very difficult to achieve both simultaneously.  Too often I see performance improvement initiatives fail because people are trying to change too many things at the same time.  People generally have the capacity to focus and execute 1-3 things very well, the more we pile on, the more difficult it is to excel.  People get confused, priorities are blurry, understanding what works and what doesn’t is impossible.

Often, it’s important to separate the performance improvement initiatives, focusing first on one area of improvement, then the next, then the next…..  Ideally, taking small, but very rapid steps.

As we look at sales effectiveness and efficiency initiatives, generally we have the greatest impact in performance improvement by focusing first on effectiveness—doing things right.  For example, making sure people understand the sales process and are executing it well–improving their deal strategies, creating great value with the customer, maximizing our ability to win.

As we as individuals or as our teams start maximizing their effectiveness or impact, then we can start working on efficiency–how to we achieve the same goals more quickly, how do we achieve the same outcomes with a smaller resource investment?

If you are struggling in making your sales performance improvement initiatives work, consider separating them–focus first on effectiveness, then focus on efficiency.  You’ll find you are accomplishing much more–faster.

Sales people are often described as Hunters or Farmers.  Hunters have been characterized as chasing after new customers and new opportunities.  Farmers focus on nurturing established accounts, keeping loyal customers, growing the business primarily through servicing the customer and growing the relationship.

I’m not sure that model has ever been appropriate, but in today’s world of value creation, the model falls far short of what our customers need and what our own organizations need.

Everybody Hunts!  It’s the responsibility of each sales person to constantly develop their territories–whether it’s an industry segment, a geographic region, or a named account, everyone hunts.  We have to constantly be assessing our territories, looking for opportunities to grow.  We have to be constantly exploring–developing new relationships, finding new ways to contribute to our customers.

Our customers deserve far more than nurturing and great service.  Those are table stakes for any sales territory, but they don’t help our customers grow and improve.  They don’t help our customers get better.  Our customers need us to be hunting–helping them to discover new opportunities, new ideas, ways to grow and improve.  Our customers and prospects need us to challenge them, to get them to think about new opportunities for their businesses, to improve their own success.

Hunting demands curiosity and creativity.  Hunters have to search, they have to discover, they have to push.  Hunters are constantly exploring–finding untapped potential in their territory, a new customer, a new opportunity, something different for current customers.  Hunters know, they must create new ideas and visions for their customers and prospects.  They know they must nurture and develop those ideas over time.  Hunters know they must be patient, working with the customer, developing them until the time is right, until they are prepared to buy.

Your customers want hunters not farmers, they want us to help them build their business.  Are you hunting within your territory, are you living up to your customers’ expectations?

The other day, my friend Jill Konrath wrote a compelling post, Silence Is Complicity.  Please make sure you read it.  The post resulted in an email discussion between Jill and me on the topic of Intolerance.

In the national media, we are pummeled by pundits spewing messages of intolerance.  Whether they wrap themselves in their country’s flag, claiming patriotism, or in the “rightness” of their issue, or claiming a religious position, or are just plain mean; we’re surrounded by intolerance.  Their messages are nothing but poison.

These people refuse to recognize other points of view, other ideas, and positions.  Through arrogance, conceit, ignorance or fear, rather than engaging in a healthy exchange of ideas, or in listening and understanding, they seek to destroy, to tear things down.  This behavior is shameful.  To see so called leaders or influencers spewing this venom sets a terrible example and makes all of us littler, stop all progress, and keep us from growing.

One doesn’t have to look far back in history to see the damage done by intolerance.  Millions of deaths, decades of repression, cultures and economies destroyed.

Intolerance is the enemy of progress, of innovation, of growth and creativity.  Intolerance does not create success, but instead drives failure.  It impacts all of us because it stops the exchange of ideas.  It stops us from seeking to understand and to be understood.  It stifles our growth as individuals, communities, organizations, and nations.

At a time when so many are searching for answers, whether to achieve our personal goals, to find ways for our companies to grow, to provide solutions for our communities, or to be better world citizens; intolerance stops all of that.

It’s differences that make us great.  Differing backgrounds, differing experiences, differing beliefs, different ideas, different points of view.  No single person or group can have the answers.  But the healthy exchange of views and ideas enable us to consider new things.  Rather than trying to shut down or shout down those who hold a different point of view, we need to encourage them to speak up, we need to listen, we need to respect them—though we may still not agree with them.

Ideas, conversations, differences in views are the stuff that create growth, and isn’t that what each of us is trying to do?

Intolerance is around us every day.  It’s just not the garbage we hear in the news.  We see it in very subtle ways every day.  It’s the bullying, it’s people who don’t listen, it’s people who stop learning.  It happens in little ways, but accumulates, and worsens.

The only way we fight intolerance is to refuse to succumb.  We must continue to question, we must continue to explore, we must continue to learn.  We cannot stand by and say nothing, because if we do, Silence Is Complicity, and silence destroys each of us.

We organize our companies by function–sales, marketing, customer service, finance, manufacturing, development, an so on.  I suppose the management science guru’s thought it the most efficient way to organize and run a company.  Each function has their goals and performance measures, each naturally optimizes what they do to achieve those goals.  The senior executive team seeks to make sure the sum of each function’s performance enables the organization to achieve it’s goals.  It’s a model that works pretty well.

But then there’s the customer.  The customer may first become aware of our companies through our marketing outreach.  It may be an ad, commercial, something they heard from another customer, an email, or a search result from Google.  They first start to get to know us through our marketing messages.  Marketing executes their strategies–engaging the customer based on their plans and programs, all designed to optimize marketing’s attainment of their objectives.

They get more interested, they reach out, “We’re interested in your products and services…”  Sales jumps in.  They engage the customer and work with them through their buying process.  At the end of that process they like what the sales person has done, they say, “We want to do business, we want to buy…..”  Sales has worked with the customer, achieving their goals.  The sales process, the overall model is optimized by the sales function–achieving it’s goals, hitting the numbers, maximizing productivity.

Order entry gets involved, perhaps our legal department, if there are contract, other functions get involved.  The order is eventually placed, the customer may deal with our shipping departments, or possibly our implementation and delivery teams.  We have our order management, contracting and other processes—all well tuned efficient in their operations and workflow.

Then finance sends them the bill, the customer starts dealing with a receivables person in paying the bill.  Finance is very efficient–after all they are really numbers driven.  The billing, collection and all other functions are well tuned organizations.

Our customers buy the product, pay for it, now they are using it.  They have a problem or question.  They call customer service.  Customer service is responsive.  They work with the customer to solve the problem.  The customer may have waited on hold for a while, the customer may have had to call back a couple of times, perhaps dealing with different people, but their problem is solved.  Customer service has met their problem resolution metrics, their turn around time.

Our organizations are working as we designed them.  Each function is efficient, effective, meeting it’s performance goals and objectives.

Then the customer needs to buy more.  They start their cycle again—we send them back go “Go,” they don’t get to collect $200 and they go through the same experience again, it may be a little faster, slightly different because they know us and we know them.  But they walk through our functions and silos.

Things are changing, customers aren’t feeling comfortable with their experience with us, they think, something has to be different, they start considering alternatives, or suggesting we change our approaches.

The problem with customer experience today, is we’ve designed customer experience around the efficient operation of each function in our company’s  organization.  We’ve designed the experience to focus on each silo achieving their goals, operating efficiently and effectively.

The problem is, this customer experience design isn’t very customer focused.  It’s internally focused on our own structures, functions, and operations.

Customers are questioning this design, they are questioning their experience.  They are wondering why the experience is optimized for us and not them.  They are challenging us, “Shouldn’t you be optimizing my experience?”  They are voting with their pocketbooks, working  with suppliers who create great customer experiences.

We’re all struggling.  We recognize  customer experience has to  be designed for the customer, not for us.  We’re struggling with understanding what great customer experience means and how to organize ourselves to deliver it.  We struggle with what it means to our own operations–what’s the impact on our effectiveness and efficiency?  What’s it mean to our growth and profitability?

Creating great customer experience—based on the experiences customers want is not in conflict with the efficient, effective and profitable operations of our own companies.  We can create and deliver great customer experience while meeting our goals–after all, that’s also in the customer interest.

The only issue is the design point.  Great customer experience design starts with the customer, not with our internal operations.  If we start our design from an outside-in perspective, we can simultaneously created differentiated customer experience and have lean, efficient and effective operations.

It’s only a matter of where you start.

I just read the IBM 2011 Global CMO Marketing Study.  It’s a fascinating report, based on in-depth interviews with more than 1700 CMO’s worldwide.  It’s a must read for any sales and marketing professional.

As I devoured the 72 page report, something struck me—where’s sales?  In a discussion of critical issues facing CMO’s there was no discussion of the Sales Function or how Sales and Marketing need to work together.  I wondered if I missed something, so I searched on the words “sales, sale.”  Those words occurred 23 times in the 72 page report.  Two times in the title of someone quoted, one time referring to campaigns, two times referring to data, sixteen times indicating revenue, and two times referring to the sales organization.

The CMO’s stated their four biggest challenges are:  Explosion of Data, Social Media, Proliferation of Channels and Devices, and Shifting Consumer Demographics.

Where is Sales?  Where do CMO’s talk about the Sales Function or the importance of Sales and Marketing aligning to maximize their impact on revenue generation?

I reread the report three times, thinking I had to miss something.  I didn’t.  Apparently the sales function and organization is not on the radar screens of these 1700 CMO’s.

For some time, I’ve been evangelizing the concept of sales and marketing integration.  As we look at the new world of buying, we find that sales and marketing processes must be tightly integrated and aligned to maximize impact on customers.  As we look at Challenger Sales, the new customer engagement, the importance of social selling, rich content, and so many other things; sales and marketing are becoming inseparable.

Yet this doesn’t come up at all in the concerns of CMO’s from around the world.  How can any CMO ignore the role of sales in impacting their own effectiveness? 

As bad a picture as it paints, at least we start understanding the magnitude of the disconnect between sales and marketing.  For each of us to be focused on maximizing our impact in our markets, for each of us to be seeking to engage our customers in meaningful ways, for each of us to contribute to the revenue and share growth of our organizations, we must depend on the other.  We are wasting money, resources, and customer equity by working separately or, at worst, with conflicting objectives.

The new buyer is changing all the rules.  The new buyer is telling us, sales and marketing, that they want something different from us–in how we educate and inform them, how we engage them, and how we help them achieve their goals.  They are demanding value, but how can we maximize our value if the right hand (marketing) and the left hand (sales) aren’t working in lock step.

It seems that before our organizations can maximize our impact on customers, we must first learn how to work together, knocking down the walls between organizations, aligning ourselves, our goals, our programs, presenting a single face to the customers.  What is unstated in the survey, but implied by it’s absence is the single biggest problem for sales and marketing executives is their inability to work with each other.  Until, we focus on this problem, until marketing and sales become inseparable, until our processes are so intertwined, until we can complete each other’s sentences, we will never maximize our impact on our markets and customers.

I’m looking forward to IBM’s 2012 survey of CMO’s.  I hope this comes up as an issue in that report.  If it doesn’t, then perhaps the 73% of CEO’s who are dissatisfied with the performance of their CMO’s may take action.

I was reviewing a sales situation with a client earlier today.  The sales person had done a fantastic job in managing the sales process.  He had dealt with all the stakeholders, the competitors had presented their case, the advantages for my customer were compelling.  Everyone was recommending my client’s solution.  Everything was in the hands of the decision-maker—and it’s been that way for a month.

The decision-maker just isn’t making a decision.  We’ve looked at all the issues–the business case is very strong–so good that every week the decision is deferred, the customer continues to lose a lot of money—so there is a clear financial/business incentive to make a decision.  All the implementation risks, all the gotcha’s have been addressed–both by my client and by the competition.

My client has checked with the decision-maker’s management—the ball—the decision is clearly with the decision-maker.  Yet a decision isn’t being made.  The sales person has asked, “Is there anything else you need to understand, are there any issues we need to address.”  Usually the response is about detailed questions about the capability–more “how will this work,” or validating what has already been communicated, but none of it having to do with making a selection.  All the change and change management issues/fears have been addressed–there is nothing more.

This case is actually not very unusual.  Some people have great difficulty making a decision.  They may be very analytic or risk averse–always looking for more data on which to make a decision, and never comfortable that they have enough.  They are looking to eliminate all uncertainty and risk, making the perfect decision.  There is never enough data to present—they are always worried they have missed something—there is always just one more thing–they don’t know what it is, but they fear they have missed something.

Some people have difficulty making decisions because they may make someone unhappy.  In building consensus with their buying team compromises have been made.  Some people may not be as “happy” as others.  Some decision-makers are uncomfortable about this.  They may even be uncomfortable making a selection of vendors–having to tell someone “no.”

We’ve reached a point–all the selling is over–there is nothing more to do, there is no more information, no adjustments of the offer or pricing, nothing more we–or the competition to say.  Sometimes it gets to the customer just has to decide–but they can’t.

This is one of the most difficult situations for sales people to deal with.  We keep looking for more–because the customer seems to be looking for more, when in reality there is nothing more that can be provided.  Too often, when we face this situation–we keep looking for more, we keep trying to persuade, we keep trying to offer more proofs. This just feeds their insecurity and doesn’t move them to making a decision.

Ideally, in the selling process, a compelling event or deadline by which a decision must be made forces the decision.  This is the best case–it’s why as sales people, very early in the process we need to help the customer establish an immovable deadline.

However, as clever as we may be, it’s just not possible to do that.  People can continue living in great “pain,” foregoing opportunities to improve or save–simply because they are afraid to decide.

At this point, it’s probably best to have a heart to heart with the decision-maker–not about the superiority of our solution, the value they will get–they already know that.  The discussion has to be about the decision itself.  Sometimes it’s a matter of acknowledging their fear and uncertainty.  We may need to reassure them in some way.  Sometimes, it’s helping them understand where they are in the process–getting them to see they are at the end–there is nothing more that can be said or done, there are no unresolved issues, that the only thing left to be done is making a decision.

At some point, all the selling is over, and you just have to tell the customer, “You have to decide, there is nothing more that we can do.”

I’m amazed by many of the discussions I read about sales performance management.  At some point the “bell curve” is introduced, it’s sliced into “A’s, B’s, and C’s.”  Then the discussion focuses on how you shift or bias things to the right (the high performance side) of the bell curve.  There are endless debates about what you do, who you coach, how to hire, where you spend your time, how to maximize performance.  Taken to an extreme, the focus is “get all A’s, then everything is perfect.”

These discussions are good discussions, but the present a relatively static view of the organization, of sales strategies, and of performance management.   In reality, top executives must continue to shift the curve to the right, continuing to raise the bar on performance.  We have to look constantly at improving sales performance, effectiveness, and efficiency.  We must look at constantly improving and innovating, enabling each sales person to continue to grow in their abilities and in their contributions to the business.

Whether it’s “shifting the curve to the right,” or “raising the bar,”  it’s critical for sales executives to focus on this.   Nothing stays the same–what we do must continue to evovle and change.  It’s critical to have a clear picture of where we are moving the organization, and how we will achieve it.  It’s critical to have a establish and execute a plan to “move performance to the right.”  Our goals, strategies, structures, and sales deployment strategies will shift and change.  Our processes, systems, tools need to change to support our goals.  Our hiring profiles, our performance expectations, our metrics, our compensation and incentive systems will change. 

Outstanding performance today, may be just OK tomorrow, and unacceptable the day after.  Today’s “A’s,” may become tomorrow’s “B’s” unless we are coaching them and developing them to support our future needs.  Likewise for “B’s and C’s.”  We can’t afford not to address these performance issues today, because they will become bigger challenges in the future.

• What are you doing to shift the curve to the right?
• What does this mean for your strategies, organizational models, priorities, and programs?
• What does this mean for the skills and capabilities of your people?  Do you have the right people?  Do you need different people?  Have you changed your recruiting profiles?  What are you doing to prepare your people to shift to the right?
• Do you have the right processes, systems, and tools to support this shift and your people? 
• Do you have the right performance expectations, metrics, and incentives?
• Do your people understand the “shift?”  Do they understand their role?  Do they understand your expectations? Have they bought into it?
• What are you doing to coach and develop your people do drive the shift?  What are you doing with those that can’t?

Life and business never stands still.  We must constantly change and improve.  Are you shifting your curve to the right?

Some of you reading the title will say, “Dave’s really gone off the deep end this time, if the customer wants to buy, isn’t that enough?”  Maybe in B2C that may be sufficient, but in today’s B2B world, it’s not enough. 

I’m seeing too many sales people with too many stalled deals.  Too many deals clogging up the bottoms of funnels, too many deals that are “almost there,” perpetually.  Sales people claim, they’ve done everything possible, but they just can’t get the order.  We drill into those deals, “What’s keeping the customer from moving forward?”

I may be playing some word games with “wanting” versus “NEED,”  but I think it’s critical for sales people to understand this.  In today’s world, customers won’t buy unless there are compelling consequences to not buying.  The things that happen as a result of not buying must be critical–they must be things the customer has to avoid or eliminate.  They must be more important than any other choice the customer has.

But what about the business case, the justification?  Well that’s part of the problem.  Too many deals I review don’t have the business cases completed.  The customer sees the benefits, we may have talked about areas of savings, improvement, and growth, but the specific business case has not been completed.  When I ask, often I’m told, “the customer isn’t asking for one,” or “what we’ve provided is enough.”  A business case is mandatory, unless we are dealing with the owner, there has to be a business case.  The buyer–regardless of level, needs a business case to evaluate the investment and to get approval.  Even the CEO of large public companies need a business case.  It’s not the customer’s job to develop the business case, it’s our job.  If we want the deal to get done, we have to develop the business case, we have to guide the customer in making sure they understand the business case and that it meets their criteria.

No business case, no deal!  It’s as simple as that, as much as the customer may like the solution, as much as they may see the value of the solution, no business case, no deal!  No amount of excitement or desire on the part of the customer will get the deal done in a B2B environment.  If you’re involved in a deal that doesn’t have sufficient business justification and you can’t figure out a way to close the gap, walk away.  It simply won’t happen.  Stop wasting your time, tell the customer who wants to buy to stop wasting her time.  No business case, no deal!

But the business case is not sufficient.  I’m seeing too many deals with great business cases that aren’t getting done.  A while back, I wrote, “Are Your Customers Doing The Right Job Of Qualification?”   These days, too often, we can develop a great business case with the departmental or functional executives we are dealing with.  They want our solution, there is a great business case for the solution, but the deal doesn’t get done.  The days of “finding money for justified business proposals” are gone.  If  the deal isn’t critical, if the deal doesn’t fit into the top 1 or 2 strategic priorities of the organization, it simply won’t get done.

We have to provide leadership in doing this–we need to make sure our customers qualify their management upfront.  We need to make certain there is a NEED the organization has–not just our customer.  That NEED has to be one of their top priorities.  If it doesn’t exist, our ability to get the deal done–our customer’s ability to get the deal done is at risk.

How do we do this?  It’s not easy, but here are some ideas—all based on having a rock solid business case.

• Does what we are doing fit the strategic priorities of the top management in the organization?  Can we directly tie this initiative to those strategic priorities and the impact we will have on them?  Can our customer do this?  (Note, this means we have to understand the strategic priorities of our customers–too often I find sales people don’t know these.)
• What are the consequences of doing nothing?  Too often, our business cases talk about the justification for the purchase–have we met the ROI  or payback objectives?  But sometimes the business case misses the consequences of doing nothing.  Can we make the consequences of doing nothing unacceptable to the customer?
• Why must it be done NOW?  This is somewhat related to the previous point, but too often things can be pushed back.  The customer will do it–just later—then even later—then….  Why is it important to take action now?  Can we create a compelling event, a compelling reason that would cause them to miss something if they didn’t act now?

What ideas do you have?