Our Job Is Helping The Customer, But All We Do Is Focus On Beating The Competition…..

I have to start this post with an acknowledgement and a concern about misinterpretation/misapplication of this article.

• First, every month, Lahat Tzvi and I have a conversation. We don’t have a set agenda, we talk about what we are seeing, usually it’s me whining about the state of professional selling. Lahat has an amazing talent to start drawing new ideas and thinking. This post is one of the things he had me thinking about this morning.
• In this post, I’m going to make the argument, that based on what I see in too many selling initiatives, is that we, as a community, have migrated from focusing on helping customers solve their problems to just beating the competition. I’m afraid too many people will latch onto that concept and miss the real point of this post which is the revenue/growth potential we lose. Our focus on beating the competition diverts our ability to drive substantively higher levels of performance, value creation, growth, and revenue through helping the customer solve their problems.

With that as forewarning, let me dive into this.

The majority of our sales engagement strategies involve us in only the very latest stages of our customers’ buying journeys. While we claim to want to help the customer solve their problems, we aren’t. By the time we engage the customer, the customer has determined how they will solve the problem. Our only involvement is influencing which vendor they are choosing to implement in that solution. As a result we win by beating the competitor, not what we’ve done in helping the customer solve their problem.

There is so much data around how we are getting involved later and later. The old Challenger data shows customers typically involve vendors when they are about 60% through their buying process. That data is at least 10 years old, and based on what we see in most buying cycles is that buyers defer vendor engagement until as late as possible.

While we talk about helping the customer determine their needs, our conversations are oriented not around defining and helping the customer learn about the problem, or the risks, or the challenges with the problem. Our discussions aren’t oriented around inciting a customer to change and the challenges of that change.

Instead, our engagement strategies force our customers to do all the heavy lifting in the change initiative. Any need identification we perform is reduced to “what features, functions, capabilities do you need in your solution….?” And if we probe and help them rethink their “needs,” we are really focusing on, “wouldn’t it be great if your solution had this function….”

In fact, typically sellers get involved when the customer has developed a short list of alternatives they want to consider.

Think about that for a moment.

While we claim to be focused on helping the customer solve their problem, the customer has actually done that. They have solved their problem, they have determined what they want to do. They have gone through the struggle of defining the problem, learning about it, looking at what others do, engaging others in the organization in assessing the situation and defining the problem. They are figuring out what questions they should be asking, what data they need to understand, the consequences of not addressing the problem and the risks involved in the change initiative. They have done all that work long before they engage us. By the time they engage us, they have actually determined the solution to their problem, what they are doing with us is choosing which vendor they are going to use to implement that solution.

So most of our selling has nothing to do with helping the customer define, understand, and solve their problem. Instead, it is primarily focused on beating the competition.

Stated differently, any alternative the customer chooses will solve their problem. So our job is merely to beat the competition.

And, while we don’t admit that to ourselves, our strategies and actions are solely focused on beating the competition. We train our people in our products and their superiority. We train our people in competitive differentiation and objection handling. Our content focuses on product capability and differentiation. We have endless comparative checklists showing our product superiority. We do demos focused on demonstrating that superiority.

We do everything we can to create inbound, “I’d like to learn more about your product….” Our outbound is not focused on “do you have a problem,” rather “do you have a need for this type of solution?”

We have trained/or let our customers figure out what their problem and and how they want to solve it. We want them to say, “We have determined how we are solving this problem and as part of it we need a product that does this…. Can you show us how you do it?”

We revel in this strategy. It simplifies our jobs. We don’t have to help the customer solve their problem, by the time they have engaged us, they’ve determined solution, they just are deciding which product they want to buy. So our focus is exclusively on beating the competition. And we know if we can’t beat the competition on features, functions, feeds, speeds, we can beat them on price.

Leaders love this. It significantly reduces the cost of selling, we don’t need the same skills that it takes to “solve a problem.” All we have to do is focus on our product being better than the competition. We can be more predictable and prescriptive about how we present our products. We know our competitive positioning, how to beat the competition and so forth. All we have to do is execute those things consistently.

Many people will stop reading here. They will say, “this confirms everything we have been doing. We need to double down on this approach.” The focus is on finding customers who have solved their problem, but just need to make a choice of which product they will use in that solution.

Repeating myself, the majority of modern selling has little to do with helping the customer solve their problems, but it is simply about beating the competition.

For those who are curious and want to read further, here’s the key question:

“What would it mean if we truly adopted a strategy around helping the customer solve their problem?” (There are other shoes I’ll drop toward the end of this post.)

The “negative” sides of this is that it requires a much different skill level. It requires sellers who actually understand our customers and their businesses. It requires sellers who have some level of knowledge of the problems they solve and how it impacts customers. It requires sellers who can actually help the customer navigate their problem solving process.

It’s potentially more difficult to find these people. They may be more expensive. We have to invest in training them differently, we have to provide them the tools to help them and the customers navigate the problem solving process.

You can see why so many opt for the “beat the competition” strategy. It’s easier, cheaper, and more predictable. After all, since it seems the majority of organizations seem happy with 15-20% win rates, we just need to make sure our qualified pipelines are 5-7X our goals and that we are doing enough demand gen to fill those pipelines. The more our content focuses on the capabilities of our products, the more we focus customers on what we want to focus them on. And PLG??? That’s ideal, it’s all about our products. It’s the customers job to solve their problem, we just focus on the products they will use in implementing the solution. Piece of cake…..

But here’s the gotcha. Think of the lost opportunity! Think of the revenue and growth we are foregoing by restricting our sales strategies to just beating the competition! Think of the retention, renewal, expansion revenue we can get if we help customers in defining and figuring out how to solve their problems!

We already know the majority of buying decisions end in no decision made. In Jolt, Matt and Ted cite, 60% of buying decisions end this way. I’m seeing other research suggesting it’s much higher.

Then we have the data on the 40% that do buy–where the solution is simply the vendor that has beat the competition–there is increasing regret. They worry, “Have we done the right thing? Are we really solving our problem, are we doing it the right way?”

We see other data about longer buying cycles, reduced loyalty, reduced retention. We see endless data around decision confidence and sensemaking.

We know that customers struggle to solve their problems, after all, they have probably never faced it before. We know their focus and expertise is on their day jobs, and figuring out and solving the problem adds to that burden. We know they want and need help.

What if looked at these realities and we really started helping the customer solve their problems? Imagine they value we could create and the trust we could build if we worked with customers on the toughest parts of their problem definition and solving process, rather than just exploiting the easy stuff?

If we looked at this selfishly, the reason to focus on helping customers solve their problems (versus choosing our product) is the revenue and growth opportunity!

If we reduce No Decision Made–helping more customers have the confidence to actually take action and solve their problem with confidence. This shifts us from what we get from the 40% that actually make a product choice, and enables us to help the 60% that fail! I have a couple of clients that have set explicit goals on reducing no decision made. They view this a net incremental to their business plans.

And even applying this to that 40% will reduce decision regret, building retention, renewal, expansion.

Some will, naively, argue, “That’s too expensive and takes too much time!” In our experience implementing “Business Focused Selling” approaches, we see win rates skyrocket–most of our clients have win rates of 60-80%. We see No Decision Made plummet because the sellers are building the customer confidence through the entire process. And we see buying cycles reduce by 30-40%. This is because they don’t know how to navigate the problem solving/buying process, so they wander, shift directions, start and stop. Helping the customer more effectively navigate the entire process, significantly reduces buying/selling cycles.

So where am I in this discussion? The point I’m making is that selling to beat the competition causes us to dramatically under serve our customers, creating far less value than we can/should create. This adversely impacts retention and expansion over the long term.

Perhaps more importantly and more selfishly, selling to beat the competition causes us to dramatically under perform our potential! If we help our customers solve their problems. If we help them better understand, define, and navigate the overall change/and buying process we drive far higher levels of revenue and growth than we do currently.

Quoting Michael Douglas in Wall Street, “Greed is good!” Our current obsession with selling to beat the competition, rather than helping our customers solve their problems causes us to under perform our growth and revenue potential! And it causes us to under perform our profit potential! We can and must do so much more in driving growth for our own organizations! (Please, the “Greed is good” argument is offered somewhat tongue in cheek….but you get what I’m trying to say.)

This is such wasted opportunity! I just don’t understand why “we” are so committed to this level of under performance when the opportunity to significantly grow our revenue is right in front of us!

And……

I’ve only addressed the opportunity represented by those customers who have already committed to a change effort but need help. I’ve not yet addressed the opportunity we create by inciting customers who don’t realize they should change, that there is a better way of doing things.

Hopefully, I’ve started conveying the idea and the frustration I have in seeing so many organizations committing to under perform their potential. I’ve been a bit disjointed in the argument I’ve presented, but there is so much opportunity that we are missing, so much more we can do, but are failing because of the narrowness of our vision. I’ve been trained in a mindset to drive as much growth and revenue as possible. I just don’t understand why so many of us settle only on beating the competition.

And if you need the reminder around my affinity to this “greed…….”