Facing Reality
One of the things I love the most about sales people is the eternal optimism. It really takes a tremendously positive outlook to be a great sales person. After all, we face rejection every day. We face challenges and obstacles in every situation. Some are challenges come from changing customer expectations. We always face market and competitive challenges. Sometimes we face challenges from within our own companies.
It requires tremendous resilience and optimism to succeed in selling.
But sometimes that optimism hurts us. Sometimes it prevents us from looking at reality, from seeing things the way they really are, not how we want them to be. This is, perhaps, the most dangerous challenge sales people face. It’s one of our own creation. And it’s funny, it sneaks up on us–it never smacks us in the face, it kind of creeps in. All of a sudden we find ourselves mired in a very difficult situation, struggling to understand and work our ways out.
It happens all sorts of ways. Our pipelines aren’t as full as we want. Our managers may be pressuring us to increase the numbers of deals in the pipeline. We relax our qualification criteria to get more deals—but because they aren’t in our sweet spot, our ability to win is threatened. All of a sudden our win rates go down. This makes our pipelines look worse, we relax our qualification criteria further…. you know how this story ends.
Or it’s the deal we just can’t let go. We’ve invested a lot of time and resource. We believe if we just do a few more things, we can persevere. We do those, it’s not sufficient, we do a few more…… it goes on forever. The deal’s dead, but we can’t let it go.
Or we are busy, our days our filled with meeting after meeting, call after call. But we aren’t making progress. We confuse busyness with progress and accomplishment.
Facing reality is critical to our success. If our pipelines aren’t full, we mask the real problem by filling them with junk. If a deal just won’t move forward, continuing with wishful thinking doesn’t change things–it keeps us from really understanding what it takes to win–or even if it is winnable And busyness masks everything. We don’t have the time to reflect, to understand if we are making progress or just filling our time.
Facing reality is tough. We may discover things we don’t want to confront. We may not be as strong as we had hoped we were. We may discover we need new skills to improve our ability to compete. It may tell us we’re spending our time with the wrong customers–that we may have to find new customers.
Facing reality is important. Good or bad, it provides the ability to understand the issues most impacting our performance. It helps us identify and solve our problems. It allows us to improve or fix things that keep us from achieving our goals.
It’s easy and tempting to fool ourselves, to the point of hiding our heads in the sand. But that doesn’t fix the problem, it makes it worse.
If you aren’t achieving your goals, are you really looking at what’s happening. Are you seeing things the way they are or the way you want them to be? Facing reality is the only path to performance improvement.
Stacking The Deck!
I’ve got a terrible confession to make. I cheat. I don’t want to play fair and square. I don’t like to play on a level playing field. I do everything I can to tilt deals to my favor. I do everything I can to stack the deck.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. Our inclination as sales people is to do this. We want our customers to prioritize the things that we do well and that our competitors do poorly. Likewise, we want our customer to de-prioritize the things our competitors do well and we do poorly. We do everything we can to shift the criteria and customer’s attitudes in our favor.
Unfortunately, in the new world of buying, it’s becoming more and more difficult to stack the deck. Customers are determining their needs, requirements and priorities without us. By the time they’ve developed a short list, their requirements are already locked in concrete. The vendors on the shortlist—our competitors and us, are there because we all meet their minimum needs. The customers have leveled the playing field for those they have invited to play. Now we’re in an elimination match.
If we want to stack the deck, we have to change our approach. We can’t wait for the customer to have a need, we have to be premptive. We have to get in early–before the customer has a need, before they recognize they have a problem. To stack the deck, we need to get them excited about a new opportunity for their company–a way to grow, a way to improve. We want to create a sense of urgency around what that will do for them, and how we can help them do this.
If we want to stack the deck, we have to invest in them. We have to earn the right to have them listen to our ideas about changing their business. We have to have credibility and their trust.
We have to create value–both in the ideas and interactions, and in the solutions we offer. If we don’t we’re helping our competitors stack the deck for themselves. We have to offer more than a product pitch, we have to do more than answer their questions, handle their objections and ask for the order. Everyone else is doing that, we have to be different.
Some might say, “Dave that’s unrealistic, while we try to do that, the customer wants to create a level playing field.” I’m not sure I agree. I’m not sure that customers want to create a level playing field. I think customers want to stack the decks in their favor—in favor of helping them achieve their goals, and produce results. If we do our job right–we can align ourselves with the customer, stacking the deck to allow each of us achieve our objectives.
What are you doing to stack the deck?
Average Is Over
I read a fascinating Op Ed piece by Tom Friedman in the New York Times, Average Is Over. It’s a fascinating piece. As I reflected on the piece it struck me how important this concept is to professional selling.
Friedman makes the point, “”…everyone needs to find their extra–their unique value contribution that makes them stand out…” Friedman is not writing about organizations, he’s writing about individuals, each of us. It’s a profound concept, understanding it is like discovering the secret decoder ring for sales success.
In a buyer’s world, where too many products are undifferentiated, where the differences between the companies that stand behind the products are relatively small, where quality is similar, where everything balances out–and on average they are the same, there are two things that stand out as real differentiators: price and what each of us contributes as sales professionals. And in competitive situations, where pricing is roughly the same, the difference between winning and losing is each of us.
It’s no longer sufficient to be “average.” Each of us has to find a way to stand out and differentiate what we do. It might be our knowledge of what the customer is trying to do, it might be the confidence we instill about the new solution, it might be the trust we have earned in working with them.
Just good enough is no longer a winning strategy (a number of years ago, I worked with an industry leading company that had that as their strategy–and they were remarkably successful. We have to set ourselves apart, we have to create the value and differentiate ourselves. As Friedman points out, it is ultimately what each of us contributes that makes a real difference.
It’s a tremendously powerful concept for sales people, partly because it’s a simple concept, partly because it puts success or failure squarely in our hands. We can control and manage the difference we make with our customers. We can control and manage the value we create to set ourselves apart. Competing and winning becomes much more clear–we are in control because it is the differentiation that each of us create that separate us from the average. It can actually be quite easy–particularly if everyone else is striving to be average. In essence, we become the value proposition–or we can be one of the crowd, average.
Sales people–and the people they engage in working with a customer are the ultimate differentiators. How we and our team work with the customer is what separates us from the rest–the average.
Do you know what separates you and distinguishes you from everyone else? Are you demonstrating that in every interaction with your customers?
Do you know what distinctive value you create–for your customers, for the people you work with? Do they understand that value?
Are you constantly looking to set yourself apart?
Average is over. Average is not a winning sales strategy.
