Mid-year is approaching.  I’m talking to a lot of people about where they are with quota performance.  With too many, their hands start waving around, the stories start, the excuses start.

“We’re still seeing the effects of the economy, customers aren’t buying….”  I know their peers in the same company are making the numbers, their competitors are selling, so I wonder.

“Our marketing programs and collateral are really insufficient, I don’t have the tools I need to be successful…”  Again, there are a number of their peers faced with the same thing who don’t let this stop them.

“”We just don’t have enough leads….”  I’ve never met a salesperson that has enough leads, so I wonder, what’s stopping them from prospecting.

“The dog ate my sales call plan…….”

I may be a little hardnosed about this, but there is only one thing sacrosanct in sales, it’s The Number.  Our job, our responsibility, our obligation to our companies is to do everything possible to make our number.  There are simply no excuses.

Everything else about sales is changeable, but we can’t change our obligation to make the number.

If we don’t have enough leads, then we have to do something.  Can we get referrals, can we go back to past customers to see if they have a need?  How do we start prospecting to find new opportunities?

If our customers aren’t buying, how do we find those that are?  Can we create a different or more compelling value proposition.  How do we find those customers that are buying?  Let’s invest our time in those that are.

We don’t have the right materials and collateral—-well create it yourself!  Never let materials, tools, collateral stop you.

There are simply no excuses to do everything you possibly can do to make your number!

Does this mean you’ll be successful?  Well you won’t be successful if you don’t, that’s virtually guaranteed.  But doing everything you possibly can may still mean you don’t make the number.  But at least you have learned, you have solid data about why and you can leverage that data to improve.

Sales success is about leaving no stone unturned.  It’s about figuring out what it tales to win and owning the responsibility for that.  It’s about determination–not letting anything to keep you from achieving your goals. Sometimes it means we have to change our approaches.  What has worked in the past may not be successful, so we have to figure out what creates success.  We may have to develop new skills, we may have to change our process, we may have to go after different customers, we may have to be clearer about our value proposition.  Everything in sales is open to change—except for making the number.

Are you prepared to change everything to achieve your goals?  Are you totally committed to achieving them and will let nothing stand in your way?

There are a huge number of tools available to help sales professionals be more effective and efficient.  Properly used and implemented they can have a profound impact in improving sales performance.  At the same time, used improperly, the provide the potential of causing great problems or creating crap at the speed of light.  Every tool has the opportunity, properly used to have great impact or improperly used to have great negative impact.

Too often, however, it seems the implementation of the tool in itself, is the end rather than just a means.  People implement CRM thinking “because we have CRM, we have much greater insight into our customers, pipelines, opportunities, and so forth.”  Or implementing powerful research tools to provide great sales intelligence–without providing a foundation the sales people can intelligently use these tools.  Or providing great content and email marketing tools that are used to blindly inflict content on people who have no interest or desire to get that content.

 We too often forget about the fundamentals–the basic blocking and tackling, the foundations of sales effectiveness.  None of these tools replace the need for this, but the amplify the impact of the sales person using it.  A high performing sales person, executing a well defined sales process will get phenomenal benefit and create much more value using these tools.  They will be able to leverage their time and presence in ways they couldn’t without the tools.

We have to continue to focus on building a sound platform based on the fundamentals:  Do we have a well defined sales process aligned with the customer buying process?  Do we know how to develop and execute high impact sales strategies?  Do we have the knowledge and business acumen that enables sales professionals to connect with their customers discussing their issues, concerns or helping them discover new opportunities?  Do we understand what customers value, how we create, communicate, and deliver differentiated value?  Do we understand how to listen and really understand?  Do we have the ability to confront the customer–appropriately, to ask for money in exchange for value and to defend that value without resorting to discounting?  Do we understand how to manage our time, leveraging it for maximum impact?  Do we understand how to prospect and gain the attention and interest of people we may have never met?  Do we understand how to create, build and maintain relationships?  Do we understand how to trust and be trusted?  As managers, do we understand how to analyze performance, how to coach and develop people to achieve their full potential, how to measure performance and hold people accountable for that performance?

All of these are the foundations of high performance selling.  Implementing tools, whether they are CRM, sales intelligence, analytic, content management/delivery, presentation or other tools on this sound foundation can magnify the impact and effectiveness of the sales team.

Absent these foundations the tools can be harmful.  Not only do we waste time, resource,  money on tools that aren’t used, used well, or used properly.  But we run an even greater danger–used improperly they can have exactly the opposite affect.  They can alienate and create great distance with customers.  They can magnify poor strategies and stupid execution.  Recently, I encountered a sales person selling a marketing/lead development tool–his thoughtless use of the tool he was selling caused him to spam 1000′s of people.  My feedback to him was that his use of his tool made me certain that I would never use his tool and would actively recommend people avoid his company.  He didn’t seem to understand.  This week, I get prospecting calls from a person selling a tool that was to provide great insight into customers.  His first question was, “What does your company do?”  I get endless offers for content, newsletters for thing I never requested, things that I have no interest in. 

I talk to people who are considering the acquisition of very powerful tools.  I ask a few questions.  For example, powerful analytic tools–but are you asking the right questions?  The quality of the analytics is dependent on the quality of the question you are applying the analytics after–or the quality of the data being analyzed.  Bad questions, bad data give you terrible answers.  The greatest presentation, storytelling, whiteboarding tools are meaningless if your people do not understand the customer, what they value and how to create value.

I can’t imagine any high performing sales professional not leveraging these tools to their full potential!  They are very powerful.  But the tools are the means, not the end.  If you don’t have a strong foundation in place, they are worse than useless.  Before wasting time, resource, and money on these tools, make sure you are building on a strong foundation.

The human brain is an awesome instrument!  One of the things it enables us to do, sometimes almost unconsciously, is to instantly recognize patterns.  We encounter a situation, in nano seconds, our brains compare the situation with others we have encountered through our life.  It quickly enables us to recognize, “I’ve encountered something like this before—-this is how I recognized it, this is what I did, this is what happened as a result.”  We do it thousands of times a day, comparing everything we have encountered, looking for common patterns that have produced successful outcomes, then acting based on our experience of those patterns.

Top performers take this even further.  They move pattern recognition from the unconscious to the conscious.  They constantly compare the characteristics of what they are encountering to their experiences in the past.  They understand the characteristics or variables that are most critical to what they are trying to achieve, they assess the actions they should take based on those characteristics.  They also assess what’s different about these patterns and can quickly adjust what they do based on their past experience and the assessment of the current situation.

People who have mastered something–say a top athlete, musician, someone who has invested the 10,000 hours experts say is required for mastery have thousands of patterns built up in their brains, they have the ability to quickly assess situations they encounter, match that with the most appropriate patterns from their past experience and quickly act.  This capability is often called “muscle memory” or “instinct,” but is really the result of the brain’s tremendous pattern recognition, pattern processing capabilities.

Top performers in sales do the same thing.  They have patterns built up, based on their experience.  They are quickly able to evaluate a customer and just “know” the right way to deal with that customer.  They encounter a sales opportunity and are able to assess it against their past experience, leveraging that experience to develop and execute winning strategies.  Top sales people constantly seek to replicate that experience—find customer that fit the past patterns of success, find situations and opportunities that match the most successful opportunities from the past, and leverage that experience to be successful in these current situations.

When you speak to top sales performers about this, they can precisely describe what they look for (the patterns) and how those patterns influence their activities.  When you watch them in action, they are constantly looking for those situations that match the patterns of past success.  In fact, what they are describing is their personal sales process—the things they look for, the things they do, the responses they expect based on what they have experienced in the past.

The sales process–when taken from an individual level to and organizational level is really the collection of all those past patterns of success.  It is based on the collective experiences and collective patterns of top performers and what has made them successful.  The sales process becomes a “template” or a pattern that all other sales people can leverage to increase their success.  In some sense, it’s a shortcut to the 10,000 hours to mastery, because you are able to leverage the collective “10,000 hours” of all the top performers.

Do you recognize the patterns of your own past successes in sales?  Are you able to leverage them to improve your own personal effectiveness?

Are you leveraging the collective experiences and successes of everyone in the sales organization to contribute to your personal success–you can’t be doing this if your organization doesn’t have a sales process, or you aren’t using it?

Do you constantly update your sales process, based on the new patterns of success you see?

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?

The media business is changing.  Traditional media–newspapers, journals, and magazines are struggling to refine their business models.  Figuring out how to make money and continue to grow is a challenge for all in the media business.  As a consumer of both traditional and new media, I want to see them survive, grow, and thrive.  I subscribe to a lot of “traditional” media as well as new media.

One of the great trends I see is publishers adopting “any time, any place, any device.”  For example I can read some of my favorite newspapers in hard copy, or, when I’m not home, I can look at that content on my laptop, Ipad, or phone.  For one simple subscription, I can get to the content in a manner that’s most convenient for the moment.

Companies are experimenting, some charge a premium for digital access, many provide it free with the hardcopy subscription. I’m not sure where I stand on that, but I know they need to make money, so I’m probably OK with a small premium for the combined digital and hardcopy access.

 The problem I have is when the company thinks its subscribers are stupid.  When they go beyond making money, to treating their customers with total disrespect.

I’m a long time subscriber and avid reader of the Harvard Business Review.  For years, I have anxiously waited each copy to be delivered to my office.  I devour it in the first evenning.  For years, with my subscription, in the past roughly $79/year, I have had free access to HBR online–along with archived articles (I no longer have to save all my old copies–it’s opened up three book shelves for me.)

This year, I get my subscription renewal and am a little shocked.  I can renew my hardcopy subscription for $79, I can get an online subscription only for $99 (wow, that used to be part of my hardcopy subscription–guess times are rough in Cambridge).  Or I can get a combined subscription for about $149–about double last year’s subscription.

Furthermore, to get content on my Ipad, I have to pay an additional $79.99!

This certainly isn’t content on any device, any time, any where!!

Well, the Ipad application is out!  There are so many equally good, even better,  subscriptions I have there-Business Week, Forbes, McKinsey Quarterly, Fortune, Wired, Fast Company, journals from INSEAD,  and more.  I can live without the Ipad version.

I swallow hard and look at the combined price of the online and hardcopy version—I really like the convenience of both, but the renewal rate—after I don’t know how many years of subscribing— is $149.

I research further, I discover, if I just let my subscription lapse, and start a new subscription, I can get the same deal for $129–$20 dollars less!  It’ snot a lot, but I’m glad to take it.

But I reconsider.  This is really shameless manipulation.  The publishers must really think the readers are stupid.  First, doubling the price on me.  Maybe I could swallow that.  But now I’m offended.  For weeks, my mailbox has been filled with “such a deal” renewal notices from them–all at $149.  Didn’t they think I’d check the price on line? 

Maybe there’s something I don’t understand about the value proposition.  Let me see,  a loyal subscriber for many years, OK, times are tough for publishers, so I’ll pay a super high premium for the convenience of hard copy and online, though doubling the prices seems a bit much.

BUT WAIT!!

I could get the very same thing for $20 less, just by being a new subscriber—yes their costs increase marginally, but why should I care?  They have to process me as a new subscriber.  And I’m sure, I’ll get another dozen, “last chance,” “sure hate to lose you,” offers at $149.  Then they probably have to purge my old subscription from their data bases, which has some cost.  Perhaps they make it up by selling that data—I’m not sure, guess I have to go back and review their privacy policy.

I’m confused, which deal should I take?  What’s the difference in value propositions?

As I look at the pricing policies, I can only come to the conclusion they must think I’m stupid, a sucker, or both.

Now I’m reconsidering everything.  I think, I’m in Manhattan quite frequently–maybe I can go downtown, stand on a street corner with a cardboard sign, “Hey buddy, spare a copy of HBR?”  Or I know the neighbor a few doors down, also subscribes, maybe I can borrow his copies after he’s finished.  Or maybe I can rely on other sources of really great content.  After all, many of their featured authors have their own blogs.

The Harvard Business Review isn’t alone in it’s practice, though it does stand out as the worst, at least of all the journals, papers, and magazines I subscribe to.

With policies like this, it’s no wonder media is in trouble!

The phone rang, I picked it up.  The voice on the other end went into it’s pitch, “Hi, I’m so and so.  Would you be interested if you could invest in a stock that could give you a cud-jillion-billions return in 60 days?”

Yes, it was one of those pointless boiler-room calls.  But is was a slow day, I was a little bored, so I decided to have fun.

“Yes, I’d actually be very interested in getting that kind of return.  However, before you go further, would you mind if I asked you a couple of questions?”

I could hear the excitement in his voice, you could almost hear his thought process, “Caught another sucker, now I just have to reel him in.”  But he said, “Sure, I’d be glad to answer your questions.”

So, I responded, “My business is to help sales people close more business faster.  I can imagine, that you have to make hundreds of calls to get someone like me who is interested in talking to you and investing in your stock recommendations.  We happen to have a guaranteed method where I can actually reduce the number of calls you have to make by 75% and triple your personal income at the same time.  Surely that has to be something you are interested in.”

Silence……

“What do you mean, are you trying to sell me something?”  came the confused response.

“Absolutely not, I’m just want to show you a way to triple your income doing 25% of the work.  Surely, it would be foolish to pass up that opportunity.  Think of it, if you put in the same amount of work, your income could go up 12 times!”

“Wait a minute,” he said, getting a little impatient and frustrated, “Let’s talk about how you can make money with this stock!”

I interrupted, “I’m glad to talk about that, but would you please answer my question, wouldn’t you want to learn how you can increase your income by 12 times doing the same amount of work?”

He was clearly getting upset.  I guess my response wasn’t on his script.  “You can’t be selling me something — I don’t know you, why should I believe you!  Let’s get back to this stock!”

“Wait a second,” I replied, “I’m confused, you won’t talk to me, because you don’t know me and you are skeptical about my claim, is that correct?”

“Absolutely, now let’s…….” he continued.

“No, hang on, you won’t listen to me or buy from me.  But I’m confused, why should I listen to you?” I replied–trying to sound very sincere and very concerned.

Click…..

The line went dead……

He was probably busy dialing someone else, making one fo the 500 or so calls he has to make every day.

I’ve been chuckling to myself since then.  It was a fun call.  Sometimes, I just can’t help myself

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.

Every year, I sit through hundreds of deal reviews.  They all seem to go the same way.  The sales person talks about the deal, the competition, what the sales person or team has done.  Too often, too much time is spent reviewing and discussing past history.  However, at some point in the review, the discussion shifts to, “What do we do next?”

Often, there’s a bit of an uncomfortable silence.  Then a lot of random ideas start surfacing, “We should probably meet with…..,”  “Maybe we should do this……, “  “Let’s do a demo…..,” “Let’s have one of our executives call on them…..,” “What if we tried this…..”

I’m always struck by the seeming randomness of the discussion.  Lots of brainstorming, lots of (and some very good) ideas, but they sometimes seem unfocused or like we are grasping at straws struggling to identify the critical next steps in improving our positioning, and moving to winning a deal.

There’s simply no reason for this.  There’s no reason to be guessing, there’s no reason for the randomness in thinking.  The next steps must always be purposeful and have a strong direction.  They must be based on our experience in winning deals, knowing what’s most effective in producing results, and how we win.

Guess what, the tool that we use to do this, executing our best practices consistently is the Sales Process.  The sales process provides direction and context to our discussion on what’s next.  While the specifics will vary deal by deal, the Sales Process provides a structure and framework that’s based on our best practices and knowledge of what wins.

The conversations that are random brainstorming sessions, the confused discussions about what to do next are the result of not having a Sales Process–or not using it.  In the absence of a sales process, we have to “invent” a way to win each time every time.  We have to invent it continuously as the customer executes their buying process.  We aren’t leveraging our experience of what it takes to win, so we put our ability to win at greater risk.

One of the best things about a Sales Process is it provides a structure and a framework that helps us win!  It helps us understand what it takes to win and provides us a starting point to answer the question, “What do we do next?”  Why not focus the next steps based on what we know causes us to win, rather than guessing?  Why not use the process as the starting point to identifying specifically what advances us–yest we have to adjust what we do to the specifics of the situation, but we do in a structured, efficient and effective context.

I don’t know about you, but somehow winning–and winning fast is important to me.  I can’t imagine having to guess.  I can’t imagine putting my ability to win at risk–in fact I want to minimize that risk.  I can’t imagine not leveraging our best practices to give me direction and insight into what to do next.  I can’t imagine not leveraging the Sales Process for it’s maximum impact.

Are you comfortable with guessing and putting your ability to win at risk?  If you are, then you don’t need a Sales Process.  If not, then the answer should be clear.

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?