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 This is the easiest concern, probably the majority of stuff on the web is wrong or out of date.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?
Truth be told, most sales people would prefer to have a root canal than prospect. Sales people do deals—we love the engagement with a customer that wants to buy and is willing to give us an audience. We love the adrenaline rush of competing in the final stages of the customer buying process, convincing the customer that we have the superior solution and can create the greatest value for the customer. Then, it’s capped off by the customer calling us to let us know we got the deal!
In an ideal world, we would be blessed with never-ending qualified opportunities in our pipelines. Marketing working it’s magic somehow produces great leads, we qualify virtually all of them, then get into doing deals. Life would be wonderful!
Unfortunately, the real world is seldom like that. Too often, we don’t have healthy funnels. As much as we try to increase our win rates, as much as we try to cross sell to increase our average transaction size, most of the time there’s a great gap–we don’t have enough opportunities to pursue to make our number. We may be successful, we may be closing deals–but that empties our funnels. Unless we have new opportunities coming into the funnel, we won’t continue to make our numbers.
Ideally, marketing is creating enough demand to provide the continued flow of new opportunities. But if, for whatever reason marketing can’t provide that flow of great leads, we still have to figure out how to make out number—that’s our obligation to our companies and to ourselves. It is unacceptable to go to our managers saying, “I’ve closed every deal in my pipeline, now I just have to wait and twiddle my thumbs until marketing gives me good leads.”
If marketing can’t create a sufficient number of leads, then we have to go out to find them. We have to go out and prospect. Hopefully, there’s a willing audience–a list of people that are willing to sign up for our seminars. Ideally, we can go back to past customers, seeing if they have new opportunities. If they don’t have opportunities, ideally they will introduce us to people who do–they’ll actively refer and sponsor us to new people in their organizations or other companies. Getting a referral or introduction is very powerful in helping us identify new opportunities and we should leverage them as much as possible.
But what if that doesn’t produce a sufficient volume of great leads that we can qualify and fill our funnels? We are still obligated to achieve our goals—anything less is just excuses.
So we leverage indirect relationships. We ask people in our companies if they know people we should be talking to, we ask friends, neighbors, maybe the person sitting on the bar stool next to us (though I’d be a little careful with those). We leverage our connections in LinkedIn or Facebook. We do everything we can to leverage even the most distant connections or relationships—”Did you know you are the third cousin of my next door neighbor’s high school buddy’s roommate in college?”
Any time we have anything we can leverage–a close relationship, a past relationship, a powerful referral, a distant relationship, whatever—we leverage those because it’s out job to find a sufficient number of opportunities to achieve our goals.
But what if we’ve exhausted all of those and we still have a gap in our pipelines–maybe not for today, but what about tomorrow? We still have an obligation, a commitment to reach our goals. We have to continue to look for new opportunities. We have to……. I’m hesitant to say……. I guess I’m scraping the bottom….. God forbid….. but we have to cold call!
There, I said it, the dreaded words—”the cold call.” Well actually, it’s the well researched call to someone we may not know and to whom we have no possible introduction. We have to do the research and find a meaningful way to pick up the phone or email or show up in their office or whatever. We have to find a way to engage theses “total strangers” and reach out to them with a well researched and prepared “cold call.” And we have to do one, and another, and another…..
Cold calls are tough, they’re tough, they take a lot of work. Clearly, if we can leverage anything else that is more effective, we’d be foolish not to.
As sales professionals we have an obligation–it’s our commitment to make our goals. Again, in an ideal world, we have perpetually healthy pipelines and never have to prospect. In a real world we have to prospect, we have to go out and find new opportunities. We have all sorts of ways to do it, and we should choose the simplest and most efficient possible. but if that doesn’t produce the right volume of opportunities we can’t stop there–we have to keep exploring, we have to keep searching, we have to find new opportunities.
When we have a gap in our ability to achieve our goals–today’s and tomorrow’s, it is irresponsible not to exhaust every single alternative in our prospecting efforts–there is simply no excuse.
Recently, I met with the executive team of a large consulting/systems integration company to discuss Sales Processes and why was critical for their organizations to have a sales process. Before we started to discuss the sales process, we talked for some time about their business. I asked, “What’s most critical to your success in delivering these complex IT projects to your customers?”
They all quickly responded, “It’s really two things, it’s the quality and experience of our people and it’s our project management approach.” I asked them to talk about their project management approach. They started to describe it with some precision. They described critical success factors like:
Starting with the end in mind: They worked with their customers to explicitly define the end goals and objectives, the target dates, what success looked like, how they would measure it, and so forth.
From this, they worked backwards from the end goals and target dates to determine what critical activities were required to achieve the goals, when they had to happen, who would be responsible for each, what the sequencing was, what the critical dependencies were and how they would measure their progress.
They went on to describe their project management process. They had established a template they applied to every project. It forced them to identify key milestones for each project, they were spaced through various phases of the project. They said getting the customer on board with this project plan, and tracking to the milestones and objectives was what separated success and failure.
I asked them more about the process–naively, I thought it was just a generic process. but they said I was wrong. They had built a process that was based on what made them successful. They showed me critical milestones they had in their process. They told me that based on their past experience — projects that have gone really well, those that had failed, they knew certain things were key to success. They said if they didn’t do those, projects tended to get delays or problems would pop up. They knew those things were critical to their success.
We talked a little bit more, I was struck that their process seemed to be ingrained in the way they approached the business. They just seemed to naturally talk about what needed to be done, why. They could look at projects that were at risk and quickly develop corrective action plans to resolve the problems. One thing that struck me was they believed their process was a critical differentiator–their approach set them apart from their competition. It was something they featured when they spoke to prospects. It was a key tool to convincing their prospects they could do the project in a superior fashion, they would meet the goals and delivery dates the customer established.
In talking about how they sold, they said the project management process and the skills and experience of their people were critical differentiators in selling.
At that point, one of the executives started getting a little impatient, he said, “We’ve spent a lot of time talking about our project management process, but we’re here to talk about our selling process. I’m not clear what it is, or why we need to have one. Can you share your ideas about this?”
Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty savvy about reading signals and cues from prospects and customers, so I decided to switch gears and talk about the selling process, otherwise I might lose them.
So in responding to his query, I looked around the table, and said, “Well in a way we’ve been talking about the sales process already. You should think about the sales process as a special application of a project management process.”
I paused and looked around the table—all of a sudden there was a different look in their eyes. They suddenly got it–we didn’t have to go much further, other than discussing, how would develop the sales process.
Every company has project management processes–whether it’s how you deliver projects to customers, or how you complete projects within your organization—development projects, marketing projects, internal sales projects. We know how to do project management.
If you are struggling with your sales process-think of it as a specialized case of project management. It has a clear end goal and a target completion. There are clear milestones–these might be the transition from prospect to qualified, from qualified to discovery, and so forth. We know there are critical activities we must do based on our past experience.
If we understand project management, establishing the sales process is easy.
Are We Speaking The Customer’s Language?
Recently I was in China in a series of meetings with CEO’s of Chinese companies. The meetings were great, but we each struggled to maximize their impact. My Mandarin is very limited–basically to “Hello,” “Thank you,” and a couple of other words. Many of the executives spoke some English and were very polite in trying to communicate in a way that I could understand.
Mostly we relied on an interpreter. The problem was, the interpreter interpreted the discussion–that is he describe things based on how he heard them, not necessarily what was intended. So we had to be very careful in what we were saying and in verifying that we were aligned in our discussions and what we were trying to achieve. Fortunately, our shared intention allowed us to be effective in our meetings.
Often, when I go on sales calls with sales people, I think that we are speaking different languages. The customer is speaking their language, the sales person is speaking their—and there is no interpreter.
Each of organization and industry have their own terminology, jargon, buzzwords, and shorthand. We have ways of expressing things, that others may not understand. Too often, I see sales people reeling off terms and acronyms–often to make them sound important, but meaningless to the customer. Or sales people don’t take the time to understand and communicate in terms that are meaningful to the customer.
A very simple example–many years ago, I managed an organization whose key customer segments were automotive and aerospace design engineers. Even though the design processes were very similar, the terminology used in each industry were profoundly different. Automotive engineers tended to talk about “flow lines,” aerospace engineers tended to talk about “aerodynamics.” Same concepts, but if we used the term “flow line” with the aerospace guys, we would both lose credibility but we would lose the customer–they wouldn’t understand what we were talking about.
As sales people, we want to maximize our impact on the customer. We want to make sure our customers understand us and that we understand the customer. It’s not the customer’s job to speak our language—we have to speak the customer’s language.
This goes beyond the words we and our customers use. Each industry has key processes, metrics, practices, business drivers. These are ingrained in everything the customer does. For us to be impactful, we have to understand all of these, what they mean to the customer and how we can impact them.
Do you understand your customer’s language?
Do you speak the customer’s language?
Do you understand the key metrics, processes, practices, and business drivers for your customer?
