“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’ve been writing a lot about changing the conversation, about challenging our customers, about getting them to think differently.  A lot of readers have been sending me notes, asking for advice on how to do this.

While I agree with many of the principles outlined in Challenger Selling and Provocative Selling, I take a little different view on things.  The basic premise of many of these approaches is that we have to know our customers businesses better than they do, we have to have better ideas for their business or function than they do.

I tend to think of this as a little arrogant and misplaced.  I also tend to think this short changes our customer and us of some opportunities.

Don’t get me wrong.  To engage in these business conversations, we have to understand business—both business in general, but more specifically our customers and their businesses.  We have to analyze their businesses, we have to look at opportunities they are missing, things they can do differently, things they can improve.  It takes research, high levels of business acumen, and deep understanding of what’s going on in our customers.

Often, as I’m preparing to approach a prospect and engage them in these types of conversations, I think, “What would I do if I were running the business?  (or the function that we might focus on)  What would I change?  What new opportunities might I consider?”  I try to put myself in the customer’s place, seeing things through their eyes and develop some ideas on issues, opportunities, possible solutions.

It’s a great exercise, it gives you the opportunity to start to develop some premises around shaping the conversation.  Now here’s where it starts getting interesting.  First, customers tend to like these conversations–as long as you’ve gotten them at the right moment.  No one is having conversation like this with them.  No one is bringing them new ideas.  They’re hungry for ideas.

Here’s where I have a departure from many others writing about this topic.  Many say, you have to know your customer’s business better than they do, you have to have better answers than they do.  It strikes me a both a little arrogant and unrealistic.  If we truly knew better than they, then we should be looking to run the company, not sell to it.  But the real issue is we always view their businesses from the outside.  As much research as we do, as great as our ideas, we never have a perspective from the inside.

The real conversation starts at the intersection of these points of view–our outside perspective, experiences and idea–unhindered by “legacy experience,” and that of the customer who is, after all most knowledgeable about the internal dynamic of their companies.  It’s this combinatation where the real magic can happen.  It’s the combination of the best thinking from the inside and the outside that enables us to help the customer achieve more than they could ever imagine.

There’s an interesting dynamic that happens–the conversation no longer is challenging–it’s collaborative.  It’s the customer and us worling together to determine a solution that neither of us could have come up with separately.

It sounds kind of idealized, but I see these happening all the time.  I have them weekly with my clients–some of the highest performing executives in their functions in the world.  I see great sales people having these conversations about problems they can help their customers solve.  Clever sales people are working with customers to create solutions–leveraging the customer’s ideas and capabilities along with their solutions.  I’m working with a small company in the health services sector.  They support some of the back office functions in hospitals.  They are engaging their customers in some different conversations about their function.  Completely changing what how they deliver services and the services their customers acquire.  Another client, a company that sells commoditized electronic components is having conversations with some of the largest mobile telephone manufacturers in the world.  They aren’t talking about electronic components, but re-looking at the way mobile phones are designed and manufactured.  Another client in the bulk chemicals industry engages their customers in conversations about the future of detergent, or foods, or other things.  Still another, a provider of enterprise software is talking to their customers about a different way of running their companies.

These conversations are happening everyday, they aren’t idealized conversations, but they are sales people who want to talk about more than their products, and their customers who want to explore different ideas to grow.

I’ve written before about sales people as solution creators—but in reality solution creation is really the result of a collaboration between the customer and great sales people.

These conversations can be remarkable.  Whether it is looking at running a function more effectively, whether it is about something people have viewed as commodities, but changing the perspective of the customer.  We can have great ideas and great solutions.  We can challenge our customers and present things they should be doing. 

But the real magic is not having the customer buy our ideas, but engaging the customer in a discussion and collaborating to develop even better solutions and approaches.  To do something neither of us could have done individually.

Perhaps the real conversations need not be challenging conversations, but collaborative conversations.

Related posts:

1. What Conversations Are You Starting?
2. Challenging Idea
3. Sending Your Sales People Out Naked, The Problem With “Challenger Selling”

As I mentioned in the previous, What If We’re Not Important post, it’s always difficult to imagine what we sell and do may not be important.

Don’t get me wrong, what we do is important to someone–after all if we were truly not important, then our companies would be out of business.  The issue is are we important enough for the customers to invest in now?  We may have great business cases, but regardless how compelling the business case, if we aren’t at the top of the hit parade of our customers’ strategic initiatives, we won’t get the order.

In the last post, I suggested we address this by trying to align ourselves with one of the top 2-3 strategic initiatives.  If we can do this and become part of something important to the customer, that’s ideal.  However, try as we might, sometimes we just can’t do this.  How do we move forward?  How do we continue to sell and grow?

While it may seem an unusual strategy, perhaps we can win by making ourselves “unimportant.”  Yes, I know, it sounds weird, if they won’t buy because we’re not important, how are we ever going to convince them to buy if we demonstrate that we’re unimportant?

Here’s the thought.  There are lots of things that have to get done within organizations to make them work.  They may not be important or strategic initiatives, but they have to get done because they can impact the ability to execute strategic initiatives.  Executives can’t ignore these things—but they shouldn’t be spending their time on these things—and that’s the “in” we have to exploit.

With due respect to some of my followers who provide Janitorial services or Waste Management services (actually every sales person can learn a lot from these businesses), clean offices and empty trash cans shouldn’t be on our customers’ minds.  Clean offices and empty trash cans are unlikely to ever be part of a strategic initiative in a company.

At the same time, it’s important to have clean offices and empty trash cans.  Without these, it could impact the ability of people to execute their strategic initiatives.  (Remember for the lack of a horseshoe, a kingdom was lost.).

I’m doing the people who sell these services a disservice–their strategies in dealing with this reality are quite sophisticated and successful.  Mostly because they don’t let their egos get involved in their self importance.

But for many of us, it’s difficult to put our solutions in the same category–even though our customers already have done that.

The opportunity here is to make it so unimportant to the management team that they just don’t have to worry about it or deal with it.  They should be focusing on the execution of their strategic initiatives–not worrying about if the offices are clean and the trash has been dealt with.  A very powerful sales strategy is to take the problem off our customers’ already overloaded plates.  “You shouldn’t have to worry about this or deal with it, let us take it off your hands so you never have to be concerned.”

Our customers want to and should be focusing only on their strategic initiatives.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of other things that may consume their time–making sure the offices are running smoothly, the cash is collected, the machines are operating, the computers are working, we can make copies of documents, payroll goes out, and the list goes on and on and on.  If our products and services fit in those categories, our value is “the customer just doesn’t have to worry about it, they don’t have to spend a nanosecond thinking about it, they can spend all their time dealing with the important issues.”

Once we start thinking about things this way, it opens new ways of thinking about our products and services.  Some impact our sales strategies, some impact our overall business and solutions strategies.  We see so many companies defining what they do based on being “unimportant” to the customer.  While the folks at Xerox may quibble with me, document production, copying is really not mission critical for most of us.  Xerox and it’s competitors used to sell copiers–but the company still had to worry about it, they had to make sure to order paper and toner.  They had to have people capable of dealing with simple problems like jams.  It’s not really on the critical path to anything at a company, but it’s something that has to get done.  So Xerox and it’s competitors are adopting new strategies–they’re not just selling copiers, they are selling managed print services.  They are saying, don’t worry about it, don’t invest any time in thinking about it, don’t train your people on how to fix jams, we’ll manage all of that for you.

Being “unimportant” to our customers opens a whole new range of opportunities for us, new problems to take off our customers’ hands, new things they don’t have to or want to worry about.  We can redefine our offerings and services to exploit this–in fact creating powerful relationships and solving important problems — giving management more time to focus on what’s really important.  (Isn’t it funny how this works?)

So maybe we should stop pushing ropes uphill.  If we can’t be strategically important to our customers, if we can’t be on their critical growth path, perhaps we should focus on being unimportant to our customers.  There are more opportunities than we realize to make money by being unimportant.

(By the way, if you are struggling with these issues, call us up. We’ve been working with lot of organizations on strategies to overcome this. We’d be glad to explore these with you.)

Related posts:

1. What If We’re Not Important?
2. Buying Isn’t Important, It’s The Results Of Buying That Are Important!
3. How Important Are “Techniques” To Sales?

It’s difficult to imagine what we sell might be unimportant.  It’s important to us, it’s how we make our living.  It’s important to our company, it’s why the company exists, it’s why we design and build products and solutions 

Our solutions are important to our customers—at least some of them–perhaps a certain department, a functional area, certain teams within our customers.  It used to be, at least for larger companies, that if we could come up with a business case that was compelling enough, our customers could “find the money.”  They’d take the proposal–by that time, it was theirs–something they were wanted to do, up to management and argue for the money to buy.  Most of the time they’d get it, if it met the financial and business case hurdles, they’d get the funding.  In many cases, as we qualified customers, we either looked for budget already allocated or their willingness to get the money if the business case was sufficient.

But that’s no linger happening.  Regardless how strong the case, how convinced the customer might be, they aren’t getting the money.

We try to solve that problem by calling higher–going to the “C-Level,” engaging them, pleading our case, showing the business case, talking about the compelling results and value we produce.  The C-Level executives may nod their heads in agreement, say it’s impressive, thank us for our work and helping them address issues in their business, recognize the value we have created, smile, shake our hands, and do nothing.

See things have changed.  Regardless how compelling our value proposition, how great the business case, how much the functional or departmental executives may argue for our solution; executives aren’t finding the money.  More than ever before, executives are investing only in things that directly impact their strategic priorities — and it’s only their top strategic priorities.

All companies have long lists of things they’d like to do.  Great business cases for improvements, new processes, new approaches, areas to grow and expand, new products to develop.  But investments are only being made in the top 2-3 priorities.  If your project doesn’t fall into one of these priorities, you aren’t going to get the order.  You may have made the sale–the customer has chosen you as the solution they would like to implement, but you are not going to get the order unless you are in the top 2-3 priorities.

What do we do?

It’s a tough question–there are some sales strategies we might look at, there are some business strategies executives in your company might consider.

The biggest problem in confronting this issue is our individual and corporate egos.  It’s hard to imagine not being important because what we do is so important to us.  It clouds our vision and our ability to recognize and address the problem.  But however important we think we are to our customers, our opinions don’t count!  Being important to the customer is the only thing that counts.   So we have to get our egos out of the way to recognize and address the problem.

What next?

Well a good start–probably the only start is finding out what’s important to our customers.  It’s not understanding their problems, but it’s understanding their strategic priorities.  What are the top two or three things they are struggling with?  What are the top two or three initiatives their executive are concerned with?  Until we know those, we have no hope of being important to our customers.

Once we understand those strategic initiatives–focus on the top 2-3.  How do we position what we sell to fall under one of those strategic initiatives?  It doesn’t mean we have to solve the whole problem–we just have to be able to take a bite out of it.  We have to be able to demonstrate that what we do helps them address one or more of their top 2-3 strategic initiatives.

Recently, I spoke to a very clever sales person.  She recognized that her solutions weren’t really important to her customer–that is, they were very important in a part of the organization, but at an executive level, where the investment decisions were being made, her solutions weren’t on their radar screens.  However, she learned that customer satisfaction was a top priority.  The customer was being pummelled in the markets with customer satisfaction issues.  Their competition was attacking them, customers were fleeing.  Customer satisfaction was the most critical issue the top executives were dealing with.  She and the department head–the person who really wanted to buy her solution developed a new strategy. 

They looked at how the solution would impact customer satisfaction.  It wasn’t something they normally focused on–primarily their solutions focused on internal operational efficiency, but she knew that wouldn’t sell.  The question they confronted was “How do we link what we are doing in this department to improving customer satisfaction?”  They were able to develop a case where they could show the solution contributed to the focus on customer satisfaction.  It didn’t make a big dent in the customer satisfaction issues the executives were facing, but it took a bite out of that problem.  That’s all they needed to get approval to go forward.

Do you know what your customers’ strategic initiatives are?  Do you know how you help your customer with those initiatives?  Until you can answer this, you are wasting your time and your customers’ time.

This needs to be part of the qualification criteria–not just yours, but the buyers you work with at the customer.  What you sell is important to someone at the customer.  They want to talk to you, they want you to help them solve their problems, they want you to help them think about their parts of the business differently.  They are eager for you to create value.  But if what you and they are doing doesn’t fit within the strategic priorities of the enterprise, if you can’t find a way to show the solution addresses one of more of the top 2-3 priorities, you are setting yourself and your customers up for failure.

It’s important for you and the customer to qualify the importance of what you are doing.  It’s a tough, but critical discussion.  Customers may not want to have it–their egos are involved as well.  It’s hard for them to understand their function may not be at the top of the hit parade of their executives.  But if we don’t have those discussions and mutually develop a strategy go be a part of what’s important, we’re wasting time.

But what if, however clever you may be, you just can’t find a way to be important?  You still have to sell, what do you do?  I’ll address that in an upcoming post.

(By the way, if you are struggling with these issues, call us up.  We’ve been working with lot of organizations on strategies to overcome this.  We’d be glad to explore these with you.)

Related posts:

1. Buying Isn’t Important, It’s The Results Of Buying That Are Important!
2. How Important Are “Techniques” To Sales?
3. How Important Are Partnerships To Your Sales Strategies?

Not long ago, my wife had to be away from home for a week. It happened to be a week that I wasn’t traveling so, I had to fend for myself on meals. The first day, I struggled with what to do. The easy answer was to go to a restaurant. But I spend too much time on the road in restaurants. I considered take out, but that seemed to be a variation on the same theme.

Then I discovered something amazing—and it was less than a half mile from our house. It was this thing called a grocery store. It was an amazing discovery (I’ve led a sheltered life). I walked in and found all my meal and eating problems had been solved!  I could get everything I wanted.  Imagine that, all the answers to my food and eating problems right there–less than a half mile from my home.

As I’m prone to do, I started thinking of the broader implications of my discovery.  Did others know about this?  Perhaps so many people are blind to the fact that grocery stores might be just around the corner.  Perhaps the solution to world hunger was at hand, I just had to make this visible to the world through my blogging, writing, and speaking!  It was so simple….

When I read many of the books, blogs (including my own), or listen to speakers on sales, marketing, leadership and business strategy, sometimes, I think we have just discovered the local grocery store.  We do some thoughtful research, but on a very narrow set of premises, discover some patterns, some things that work, then immediately declare, We Have The Answer To Your [fill in the blank] Problems.

It could be a prospecting approach, how we present our elevator pitch, developing our value proposition, winning deal strategies, how to coach, how to lead.  It could be about how we measure and compensate our people.   It could be new approaches to marketing, or any number of other things……

Sales 2.0 companies and many of the “solutions providers” do the same thing.  They have something that helps certain situations, certain parts of the process.  These solutions truly provide value but to a certain small set of problems and customers.  Too many, however, position themselves as the answer to a sales person’s success or a sales manager’s performance problems.

We all tend to position ourselves as having “the answer,” but after all we are selling something as well.

I was reminded of this the other day by a very thoughtful reader.  In my post, Order Taker or Solution Creator, a very bright commenter wrote, “but Dave, sometimes all a customer wants is to know features and functions and to place an order.  When they want that, I’ll be an order taker.  Sometimes they want to be challenged, when they want to be challenged,  I’ll challenge them.”

Sales, marketing, and business is complicated.  There are no simple answers or miracle cures.  There is no right or wrong way.  There are lots of bright people who have great ideas, tools, approaches.  Things worthy of reading, understanding, applying.  Some solutions and approaches help some of us — for example, I tend to write a lot about complex selling situations, so hopefully, my advice and experience is valuable to those involved in those situations.  But it’s probably not very useful to those who are involved in transactional sales situations.

What I learned from Natalie’s comment is that great performers are truly adaptable.  They learn lots of different approaches.  They  are skeptical, they know “one size does not fit all.”  They don’t blindly drink the latest batch of Kool Aid, regardless of how popular it may seem.  They know there are no miracle cures or get rich quick solutions.

Great performers are constantly reading, learning, evaluating, and adopting.  They take a great idea, combine it with other great ideas, and execute what’s appropriate for the situation they are involved in.  For another situation, they do something else, leveraging other ideas that are more appropriate.

There are lots of great books, bloggers, speakers.  There are great tools and great ideas.  The variety of ideas and approaches, in fact, inform us there is no single path or approach to success, but there are many different ways.  Great performers look at, study and understand all of these.  They continue to learn, they continue to to explore.  Most importantly, they adapt approaches that are appropriate for the situation.

Be skeptical.  Don’t look for silver bullets.  Don’t accept someone’s cure for every problem you have.  Collect lots of approaches, tweak them and own them for yourselves.  Think about each situation and use whatever is most appropriate for the situation.  Realize there is not just one path to a solution, but there are different paths–choose the one that works best for you.

Hold me, and people like me accountable.  When we start talking about the miracle cure, push back.  Make sure you understand the specific circumstances where it works.  Make sure you understand the limitations.  We’ll all grow, learn, and improve our effectiveness.

No related posts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then they call again…..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things are bought and sold.

There are order takers and solution creators.

Which are you?  How do you know?

Related posts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

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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

As we put together our strategies for the New Year, most of our focus will be on ourselves–what are our quotas, how do we earn the most money, what are the expectations of us in the coming year?  We have kick-off meetings to go to, new initiatives, new priorities, a lot of stuff.  Much of January is spent focusing on our company and what we and the organization needs to achieve.

But as sales people, we have an opportunity, our customers are undertaking the same exercise, they are doing the same things with their sales people and with everyone in the organization.  They are establishing their goals, priorities, and expectations for the New Year.  They have a lot of new initiatives and things they want to accomplish.  They have new budgets, undoubtedly much less than they had hope for.

The most important thing we can do over the next 30 days is to sit down with each of our customers to understand their goals, priorities, and the expectations of their management.  What are the key initiatives?  Is there any new focus for the New Year?  What are the major changes? 

Often, new performance plans are established with the New Year.  Each person sits down with their manager, reviews past year performance and establishes new goals for the year.  Or current plans are updated for 2012′s goals.

Are you taking the opportunity to sit down with each of your customers to understand their goals for the New Year?

• What are the goals their organizations have established for the New Year?
• What does that mean to the people you deal with?  How are the corporate goals cascaded down to them?
• Do they have a new performance plan in place?  What are the goals established in the performance plan?
• Has there been any shift in priorities?
• Are there new intitiatives?

Over the next 30 days, we have this tremendous opportunity with our customers.  They are resetting much of what they do for the New Year, we have the opportunity to sit down, listen, learn, and to make sure we align ourselves with their goals, priorities, and new initiatives.

We can push that further.  As is often the case, customers are figuring out what to do.  New goals, new programs, new initiatives, new budgets.  What do they do, how do they achieve their goals, how to they do it within the new budgets?  We have the opportunity to help our customers figure this out. 

Too often, our focus in the New Year is internal, we actually waste an opportunity.  It’s New Year for our customers, let’s understand what it means for them, let’s align our strategies to help them achieve their goals, let’s sit down and help them develop a road map to do this-making sure we are a part of that plan.

Related posts:

1. Why Do We Reserve Moments Of Reflection And Renewal To The New Year?
2. Now What Do You Want Me To Sell This Year???
3. Before We Challenge Our Customers, We Have To First Challenge Ourselves!

Top performers–whether they are individual contributors, managers, or executives are always looking for new ideas.  They are driven for improvement and innovation.  But too often, our efforts are stymied.  It’s hard to improve or innovate.  Often, I think it’s a result of looking in the wrong places.

When I get into discussions about this with people, I pose the question, “Where do you look for new ideas?”  Often, the response are, “We look at our competition!”  Sometimes, it’s, “We look at others in the industry.”

When I hear these responses, I’m reminded of the terrific quote from Gary Hamel:  “Ideas that transform industries almost never come from inside those industries.”  There are dozens of examples of this–the start up that has a completely different take on things, the game changer that was never on anyone’w radar.  The Amazon’s, Apple’s, Facebook’s and others.  It’s a dismal but too accurate observation–but we can do something about this.

Benchmarking our competition, looking within our industries is an important element of our business, sales and marketing strategies.  We have to have competitive practices, we have to understnad the critical issues in our markets.  But at the same time, it limits us.  We restrict ourselves to the familiar, to the known, to our experience base.  We become prisoners of our own experience, blind to what is happening outside our worlds.

The good news, our competitors and our customers do the same things!  They are also blinded and limited.  This creates a tremendous opportunity — both to outcompete and outperform our competitors, and to bring ideas and innovation and value to our customers.

If we just started looking in non-traditional places–the web and social media may be one of those new places for us to hang out.  Different industries, different regions, different cultures, different business models all give us new ideas.  The ideas we may be looking at could be old and stale in their own industries or regions—but they could represent great innovation in our own.

Innovation doesn’t need to be tough, it just means looking in different places, exposing yourself to new ideas.  If you live in a B2B world–look at retail and B2C.  If you live in a box/product solution world, look at services, subscriptions, knowledge based industries.  If you live in high tech, look at high fashion.  If you are a Boomer meet some X, Y, Z’s (and vice versa).  Expose yourself to different things–different art, different music, different people, different ideas.

You could learn a lot.  You might find ideas that twisted, tweaked, artfully adapted could have great applicability for you and your customers.  They could set you apart from everyone else.  You might also get a chance to see your new competitors–perhaps before they become competitors.  That opens a whole new realm of possiblities.

Are you looking for innovation innovation and ideas in the right places?

Related posts:

1. Why Don’t Managers Think Deeply
2. Are You Committed To Upsetting The Status Quo?
3. Prisoners Of Our Own Experiences