I read a fascinating discussion about the relevance/utility of sales methodologies. There were people with very good arguments on both sides. I have to confess, very early in my career, I didn’t pay much attention to the methodology we were supposed to use. Part of it was my arrogance, I thought I could come up with better and more relevant approaches than any standard methodology. I had some reasonable success “doing my own thing.” But, as I ran into difficult situations, where I had no experience or idea how to move forward, I found myself falling back on the methodology. It helped me figure out how do move forward in difficult situations.
Let me talk about methodology and it’s importance. Then I will follow with how we get methodologies wrong.
First, I’m a huge fan of methodologies. Note, my fandom is less focused on a particular methodology, rather methodologies. I’ve been trained in almost all the big name methodologies, whether SPIN, MHI, Solution Selling, Value Based Selling, Consultative Selling, MEDDIC and it’s derivatives, Challenger, GAP, and others. We even developed and sold our own methodologies. I will continue to learn newer methodologies, as they arise.
I’m a fan of them because they help me rethink everything I’m doing. How do I more effectively engage people? How do I help them move through their buying process? How do I continue to create value through the process? How do I improve my success? How do I more effectively use my time? How do I….
Each methodology, while covering similar things, has provided me different ideas and approaches. Each has helped me learn and think differently. With some, I learned how to be more customer and problem focused, others I learned how to more effectively manage the consensus decision-making process, others I learned how to help customers think about their problems differently, others helped me incite them to change.
While it’s a tired analogy, it’s like looking at my workbench in the garage. I have all sorts of screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, saws, drills, routers, levels, squares, clamps. Some work better for certain projects than others. Some, do similar things, but for some reason I choose one just because it feels more comfortable. But I get to choose the best tool for a specific project. And, inevitably, I see a new tool every year, it ends up on my workbench.
As I work with high performing organizations, I find they have adapted a number of different methodologies to what works most effectively for them. They tend to standardize on this assembly and how they use it. They develop their playbooks adapting elements into each stage of their selling process. As part of this adaptability, they recognize, while they implement a standard methodology, every once in a while they pull a different tool from their workbench. And their methodologies evolve as their markets and strategies evolve.
There is no single best vendor methodology, but each of them can contribute to improving our ability to engage customers, each causes us to think a little differently. If you can, learn as much as you can from each.
Whether we choose a hybrid or a single standard methodology, the biggest error I see companies and vendors make is they make it about “filling out a form.” Whether it’s checking off the boxes in a methodology, completing a worksheet (I still remember the green/blue/etc worksheets of MHI), filling out a template. Too much of the implementation of methodologies is about completing the “forms.”
Too often, we fail to help people understand why they are doing these things, what it means in terms of what they learn with the customer and how they move forward. Checking a box doesn’t cause something to move forward!
These things exist as prompts or reminders to what we should be doing, but they don’t substitute for actually doing those things, understanding what they mean and why we are doing them. And if we don’t understand this, then filling out the boxes is meaningless.
And managers, too often, amplify this error. They make things about filling out the forms, rather than looking at what we’ve learned and how we might most effectively leverage that knowledge in moving forward.
And these errors limit our abilities, regardless of the methodology or methodologies we have in place.
Methodologies are important–not a methodology–but all methodologies. They help us learn and think differently. Applying them can create great results. But if we don’t understand what and why we are doing, if we are just going through the motions, we fail the methodology, they don’t fail us.
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