Introduction: Several weeks ago, I wrote, “Sellers, Are You Really Interested In Selling?” My good friend, Christian Mauer, challenged me, “Dave, why are you so interested in selling?” It was a great question and he caused me to reflect, I wrote, “Why I Am Obsessed With Selling.” At the same time, I challenged Christian and others to answer the same question.
Christian has provided a fascinating perspective. The commonality between the two of us is the obsession around helping customers solve complex problems and create great value.
This is such a fascinating narrative, please take the time to read it. And I challenge others to write, “Why are you so interested in selling?” It would be wonderful to share a variety of perspectives.
My obsession to provide Customer Value
Written by Christian Maurer
Dave,
thank you very much for picking up the challenge. I asked my question because I believe being really interested in selling is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to be successful in SALES. One can be interested in selling but for the wrong reasons, which then becomes a hindrance for sales success.
Please allow for a full disclosure first. To answer even your first question:” Are you interested in Sales?” depends on what Selling is meant to be. If it is meant to mimic how most people having the word Sales in their job title interact with their customers, I was never interested in SALES. The usual perks such as OTE, company cars, invitation to “presidents clubs” offered to sales people never motivated me. I never had a job, offering these external motivators. I also never “carried a quota”. All this does not seem to indicate that I would end up as a “Sales Expert” (not self-declared, can be verified in the recommendation section of my LinkedIn profile). I believe what got me there, was primarily my mindset.
However, I have developed a genuine deep interest in studying and understanding SALES in a systemic way. I am obsessed to help that the Business World recognizes the importance of SALES. Or as Jeb Blount says, that Sales- Professionals are recognized as the Elite Athletes of the Business World. Elite Athletes have excellent coaches, understanding the discipline their athletes compete in. So, I extended my obsession to help Leaders of the Business World understanding and accepting their important role in Coaching Sales Professionals.
Prior to my professional career
I always was considered a very curious person, passionate figuring out how things work and having a high appetite for learning. Towards the end of my High School time, I developed into a computer nerd. My parents paid me the tuition fee for learning, in my spare time, in a private institute for extra-occupational training, how to program a IBM 360-20 mainframe.
I then studied Electrical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, specializing to the max. on the topics of Computer Science. After graduation, I felt having learned to be a critical thinker with good knowledge on Systems Thinking and Computer Science. I wanted to use these abilities to develop new creative computer based real time systems for other domains than the classic data processing field. There was, though, also an inner voice reminding me that inventing and building such systems is fun. But eventually, clients need to be found who want to buy these systems because they will have a positive impact on their business. Therefore, I wanted a job that included direct customer contact so I could see the impact my work had on the customer’s business. I wanted to be where “the rubber meets the road”. That’s how my obsession to provide customer value was borne. I also felt the importance of people who could help customers to understand the business value such systems could provide. In my naivety, I did not exclude taking a role in marketing if this would make me such a person. I excluded though to become a seller. This attitude was based on the admittedly few experiences I had at the time with “B2B” type sales.
As a student, I had to buy my first scientific HP calculator not in a shop but directly from a sales engineer at the local HP office. I was not enthused by the way I was treated. I can understand the treatment I received, being a tiny fish for the sales engineer. For me as a student, it was though a big investment as the purchase ate up a huge part of my savings. In hindsight I would argue that HP as organization was to be blamed having decided that this was the only available way how to purchase this equipment. I also remembered the self-centered behavior of the person coming to our home for selling the tuition for my computer programming training who acted more like a stereotypical insurance seller.
Gaining experiences applying Intuition and Muddling Through
I found a first job as senior systems engineer which provided direct involvement with the customer. The customers, in this first job, where international airports for whom I tailored customer specific Passenger Information Systems and I was also involved in installing them at customer premises. Very soon, I moved into the role of an engineering manager. I managed a team of software and hardware engineers and external subcontractors. My contribution to the team had a technical part which was designing the overall systems architecture of new projects which then enabled me to fulfill my “commercial” part of the job; answering the technical part of RFQs and providing cost estimates to our sellers.
In my next job with a Telecom Equipment Supplier, a national subsidiary of a global corporation, my customer was the National Telecom Operator (a state-run monopoly) in Switzerland. I was hired to run the bid factory which was associated to the technical department because the technical director, in today’s speak the CTO, was in charge of developing new business. I was reporting to the VP of New Business Development. My job was to elaborate the answer to an RFQ for a new type of system providing new data-oriented services to subscribers of phone services over the switched telephone network (a kind of forerunner to the internet).
This customer had extreme purchasing power. Today, I would say they ran buy-knowing processes. They consisted of issuing RFQ’s with very detailed requirement definitions, a refusal of formal interactions with the supplier during the answering period and an evaluation where bids, not compliant with the specifications where never shortlisted. I saw the main purpose of this process in minimizing the risk for the customer’s evaluation team of being accused for having wasted money on a project that eventually did not provide the expected outcomes So, emotional aspects (fear) had priority over the rational aspects for awarding the contract. This buying process was particularly nightmarish when bidding for contracts for projects to build a new system for a new service.
Answering the RFQ was a project of several months. The big challenge was that the specifying engineers at the customer, were not familiar enough with system architecture which, by their nature, had to be based on commercially available real time computers. They also were not aware of the amount of software to be developed for the requested functionality.
Furthermore, we, as supplier, had to choose an existing hardware and software platform that could be adapted to the requirements of our customer for being able to provide a solution within a reasonable time frame at a reasonable cost. This led obviously to discrepancies between, too detailed requirement specifications by the customer and the limitations imposed to us, by the platform we had to use to fulfill all these specifications. Although the customer wanted to follow their buy knowing process, it looked to me that I was facilitating a hybrid buying process including a learning component. Intuitively I felt building trust with the customer by demonstrating deep technical knowledge paired with showing deep understanding of the customer’s concerns and providing preventive arguments for proposed necessary deviations from the initial specifications was the way to go. I consider it as my merit that our proposal made it to the short list. The commercial part was handled by my boss.
I also was aware of the important role the CTO had in this bid. With his excellent connections into the customer organization, he arrived motivating the customer to issue an RFQ. However, the customer did not allow influencing the requirements definition.
Being a bid manager is a boundary spanning role. My superiors considered it as a sales role and sent me to a sales training provided by an external sales trainer. Despite this training, building the winning bid remained a task of relying on intuition and intense customer focus to muddle through the bidding process. However, the closing remark from the trainer stayed with me as a guiding principle throughout my further career. He jokingly, advised never to tell a customer: “Mr. Customer, this interaction is not about buying, it is about selling.” A lesson, sellers, I mentioned earlier, must have missed.
Building this bid was an enormous learning experience. I had learned how “selling to the public sector” works, and had a success story to tell of having won a technical close by focusing on the emotions of the customer’s evaluation team.
After awarding the contract to us, the customer did not allow us to run away. There was a clause in the contract that the supplier had to nominate a full-time Relationship Manager to the customer, for the time until the systems was handed over and accepted by the customer. The customer defined the expectations from this role: Build and maintain a software-based project plan for preparing and running periodic project reviews with the customer. Being the first point of contact for any ad hoc inquiries from the customer or bringing up issues that needed customer involvement to be resolved. (Can you sense the buying power of the customer and their level of fear of messing up?) Internally, I was seen as the project manager building and maintaining a project plan for an international development team that consisted of internal resources for the project specific software development, a sub-contractor providing and tailoring a software platform and the supplier of the computer hardware. For successfully muddling through this role, I learned that trust was the essential working capital for me. The customer had to trust in me that I defended their interests with our organization. Our organization had to have trust in me that I defended their interests with the customer. (Call it tight rope walking.)The lesson learned for my career: For large complex projects, running away after closing the contract was not an option.
During the project implementation, it became clear that the first litmus test for the attractiveness of the newly developed service would be to attract a critical mass of users. The telecom operator had never before provided an interactive data service that had two distinguished types of users, labeled IC (Information Consumer) and IP (Information Provider). Our company decided that we could help attract IPs and thereby develop a new business by providing customer premises equipment that allowed feeding information into the operator run platform.
I was nominated the Product Manager for operator platforms and customer premises equipment for this new service. I was given a part-time post graduate education on Systemic Marketing to prepare for this role.
To promote the business for operator platforms, I relied primarily on other national subsidiaries of the international corporation our company was part of. For this segment my contact to the customers was limited to help building trust in our system by giving occasional presentations to high level people at other national telecom operators. None of these initiatives were successful. With today’s knowledge, I had learned the hard way that selling new categories via distribution partners has little chance for being successful.
For customer premises equipment, we focused on the national market with a direct seller. In addition, we also concluded a side by side selling agreement with our Computer Hardware supplier to provide leads for our software platform. Idem this agreement did not provide leads.
My main tasks were to prepare “marketing collaterals” with the help of our advertising department, and provide training and support to our seller and the computer hardware sellers. In today’s terms, developing the contents for and giving these trainings was a Sales Enablement task. Intuitively, I saw developing the contents for the collaterals, the trainings and my presentation to high-ranking people as translating the “technobabble” I was used to speak with the engineers of our first customer into “customer speak” helping the sellers to hone in on the outcomes for the business of potential customers. I also organized participations in trade shows with the help of the advertising department. There, we showcased our ideas how the new category could be applied in the potential customers business.
In this role, I also made the experience that selling a new category to a new customer by answering RFQ was easier, if one is prepared to take some risks. In two occasions, after receiving the RFQ, I took intuitively and immediately a “No Bid” decision. The normal procedure in our company was that, Bid/No-Bid decisions were taken in a contract review with the Management Board (i.e. before the fully worked out proposal was submitted to the customer). The focus was on risk management for our company. Admittedly, what I did was a rude qualification process. Had I carried a quota and been on an OTE plan, I probably would not have dared such a move. To my surprise, both prospects came back asking why we, as the considered market leader, would not want to answer their RFQ. Telling that it was for a misfit of their requirements with what we could offer made them sufficiently insecure to request for meetings where we could explain to them what the misfits were. These worked as door opener allowing me developing deeper relations with the buying teams and minimize the risk for my bid to become column fodder. Eventually, starting with “NO” led to a successful close of a deal with both customers.
I felt that my dream that I had since my graduation had materialized and I wanted to develop my career in marketing. I was offered a newly created job being the assistant of the marketing director focusing on conceptual tasks considering our national company and managing the relation to the corporate headquarters for market and competitive analysis.
I lost direct customer contact, but was assigned, among others, to a project for working out general terms and conditions (GTC) for our offers containing more and more Software and Service components. (Our company was up to then only used to sell telecommunications equipment hardware). Facilitating a taskforce with representatives from Software Development, Purchasing, Legal and Sales lead to the requested framework. Together with the corporate lawyer, we then trained all the Sellers and Bid Managers to help them understand the reasons for these new GTC and how to apply them.
My hopes of becoming my boss’s successor, when he was promoted to Managing Director (CEO in modern speak) of the national company, did not become true. Instead, I ended up to be promoted to the post of Director of Strategic Planning at the corporate HQ. Later, I would jokingly say that working in the role of the Director of Strategic Planning for an international corporation was my way to obtain the business acumen instead of getting an MBA.
New people being nominated for the top positions of the corporation, let me to believe that I had no future in this corporation. I also did not feel comfortable with playing internal politics instead of producing outcomes.
The Systemic Approach as a Hired Consultant
I was very excited when I was head-hunted by an international boutique Sales Training firm focused on B2B Sales Forces practicing complex sales. The attraction for the firm, hiring me, laid in my deep knowledge of the mechanics of the global telecom market, a target segment for growing the firm’s business. The ongoing liberalization initiatives, imposed on Telecom Operators, created disruptions which drove the need for transforming sales forces of companies (Operators and Suppliers) active in this market.
The attraction for me, to be hired, was the discovery of people who had derived methodologies how to make sellers and sales organizations more effective. When I saw their IP, I wished I had had access to it in my previous roles. This would have allowed for a systemic approach instead of relying just on intuition and muddling through. With learning to teach these methodologies, I became consciously competent how to behave in the boundary spanning role of a seller for complex B2B sales situations. As I immediately saw the benefits for adopting these methodologies, I also felt very comfortable that I could teach them to sellers in an authentic fashion.
The firm provided a very interesting working environment, different from the ones I had lived in, or what one could find with the BIG FIVES. I found a culture where the individual contributor was in high esteem and I could collaborate with many very smart and creative people in a flat hierarchy.
My obsession with providing customer value remained. But instead of providing value to customers by helping integrate technical systems in their business operations, I would now provide customer value by selling and delivering organizational transformation projects to increase the effectiveness of Sales Organizations. I quickly discovered that the adoption rate of the methodologies and processes was a key performance indicator to measure the value provided with the transformation projects.
My focus shifted from systems consisting of technical elements to systems where humans interacted (social systems). Later, I would discover a big difference between the 2 types of Systems. Social Systems are not deterministic.
My ambition, developing Elite Athletes and Coaches of the Business World, met though with serious obstacles. I found misconceptions like: trainings being knowledge transfer, the purpose being motivating sellers, the target audience being only the sellers (individual contributors) and the management hierarchy’s principal obsession was on the numbers and improving efficiency. These misconceptions led to dysfunctional behaviors with respect to the new behavior their people had been introduced to in the trainings. I also became aware that the higher the rank in the organization, the more I found ignorance and arrogance in the Business World towards the topic of Sales. Also, the Academic World was largely ignorant about SALES as a topic worthwhile to be studied and taught.
Analyzing the Sales Training industry, I found a high intensity of rivalry. The firms seemed wanting to cater to the strong desire of potential customers finding “silver bullets“ to improve their performance. The training providers also wanted to have a 100% wallet share of the customers spending on sales training. This competitive landscape certainly did not foster “holistic” solutions which can deliver more value to the customers problems.
With the CRM industry emerging, the Sales World believed having found a new “silver bullet”, when, in fact, transformation projects became more complex having now also a technological component to be considered and integrated with processes and methodologies.
The Holistic Approach as an Independent Consultant and Lecturer
With the knowledge, I had gained about the Sales Training and the CRM industry, I decided to become an independent consultant to sell and develop more holistic projects. I also wanted to explore the idea if academic institutions could be a way to better follow my ambitions.
I was invited to join the initiative “Top Sales Experts”, later renamed “Top Sales World” a grouping of independent sales consultants and leaders of sales training and consulting firms initiated by the late Jonathan Farrington which provided a platform where some of the best brains interested in SALES collaborated to make Selling a more reputed occupation.
I thoroughly enjoyed all the years where potential customers and fellow consultants approached me (Referral Selling) to help them figuring out Mental Models and Frameworks, and implement behavioral transformation projects to increase individual and/organizational effectiveness of SALES.
I also discovered the GSSI (Global Sales Science Institute) a grouping of academics researching and teaching SALES with the same intention as the people with “Top Sales World”.
My participation in the yearly events organized by GSSI led to invitation from two German Universities to become an adjunct lecturer for their Sales and Sales Management Master programs.
I took tremendous pleasure working with students. So much so, that I maintained this activity well beyond my legal retirement age. I could focus more on the WHY, the HOW and the SO WHAT than with commercial transformation projects,
It is also easier to offer students experiential learning opportunities in a protected learning environment. They learned behaviors through role plays. Admittedly, role plays are simulations. But hey, if learning flying a jumbo jet is mainly done in flight simulators why should this not also be possible for learning SALES and also later for preparing important purposeful interactions with customers. Comparative studies of the sales literature allow them to understand how to get benefits from sales books and helps them by themselves coming to the conclusion, that the “silver bullet” is a myth.
Close and Thanks
What kept me motivated through all the years as a consultant and lecturer was, when I got feedback from customers, fellow consultants, professors and students that they found the concepts, I introduced them to, as useful for better understanding their role and adapting their professional behavior to become more effective.
My sincere thanks go to all the smart people with whom I collaborated or who wrote books helping me to follow my passion, developing Elite Athletes and Coaches of the Business World.
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