I’ve been engaged in a number of diverse conversations about our GTM strategies and the challenges so many organizations face in achieving their goals. The conversations have ranged from our overall approach to engaging customers based on lean manufacturing models, to the future of SDRs, to how do we improve win rates/deal strategies, to account growth.
Other than the deep frustration people have in the issue of “What used to work is no longer working,” or “Everything is broken,” there has been a common thread through all these conversations.
The thinking has been an “Inside/Out” approach.
What does this mean?
Basically, as we design our GTM strategies we start from our own needs and goals. We design things that are most efficient for what we want to do. We design our engagement strategies, our call strategies, our deal strategies, our sales process,….everything to be optimized around our goals and objectives. We design our content to convince people about us and our solutions, we design our outreach, our SDR/BDR, our handoffs to AEs, to Demo folks, and so on in a way that maximizes our efficiency at each step of the process. When we want more, we turn the dials up. When what we are doing isn’t working as well, we turn the dials up again, and again.
We optimize on what we need/want to do to achieve our goals, thinking, primarily, “What do we do to the customer?” Sometimes, though rarely, we might rephrase it to “What we do for the customer…,” and I suspect we expect our customers to respond to our benevolence.
The real issue is, the only people this matters to is us! Our customers, the targets of our outreach and engagement strategies, for the most part simply don’t care. Unless they are in the very late stages of their buying process, where we have the least influence, the things that we do to maximize our efficiency are totally irrelevant to them.
What if we inverted the process, what if we started from an Outside/In perspective. Starting with the customer, what they care about, what they need, what they are trying to do (Sounds eerily familiar with “start with the end in mind.”)
What if we started to design our engagement processes around what the customer cares about and is trying to achieve? What if we designed our processes to help them achieve those things with greater success and more effectively. What if we recognized the smallest part of this is selecting a product, choosing to help them with the things that stand in the way of getting to that point?
When we take an Outside/In approach, we find both our customer and our success skyrockets! Win rates go up, no decision made reduces and buying cycles reduce by 30-40%.
When I evangelize this Outside/In approach, sometimes people say, “Dave, you don’t understand, we have to meet our goals!”
My response is, if I’m being snarky, “Is what you are currently doing working?” If I’m being more polite, I suggest, that we don’t get what we want until the customer successfully gets what they want–clear direction and decisions about how they will drive the change initiative and the solutions they will implement as part of the process. What if we helped them do that better and more efficiently? Then we get what we want.
So many sales organizations are struggling. What they are doing is no longer working as it may have in the past. In seeking solutions for this, most of the time they look internally, looking at how they do more, what they can do to better achieve their goals, and so forth.
The answer to how we accomplish more with our customers always starts with the customer.
David – It’s interesting to see the threads you are pulling together on this. A few days ago you published your thoughts on sales methodologies and their relevance to selling. It’s an interesting contrast to “doing more of what we always did”. Many years ago I learned Solution Selling from MIchael Bosworth. I always thought that selling began and ended with the customer. All these years later, I have consistently wondered why customer didn’t ALWAYS come first. I just published two posts about this in LinkedIn called The MIssing Middle where I am showing how one of my clients resdesigned their sales process by starting with the customer and their business goals, problems and opportunities. Why do sales leaders focus internally? Because that is what they are incented to do. Until executive leaders recognize that revenue is an outcome of effective collaboration with customers and not an end of itself, this is going to continue.
Terry, thanks for the thoughtful observations. As you might guess from my posts, this absence of true focus on the customer and how we help them achieve their goals is a mystery to me. It’s not how I was raised in selling. In the organizations I’ve led, we’ve sought to be very customer driven (though sometimes there was a lot of work to shift that off the product centered focus.
I think, as you quote Anthony, to much of selling has become a fashion show, and too many seem to mimic the fashion leaders.
Having said that, many of our clients are consistent market leaders and we see the majority of them focused on the customer, their problems and how to engage them effectively.
I can understand your observation that managers are incented to focus internally. I believe it’s managers who don’t really understand their jobs.
Thanks for the great observations.