Charlie Green and I were talking about “modern sales outreach/success.” We contrasted what we see in too many demand gen and prospecting programs, with what we have seen that drives higher quality customer engagement.
Most of “modern outreach,” is a variant of two approaches:
- “This is what our product does, buy my product……,” alternatively called the sledgehammer approach.
- “Customers like you have this problem, buy my product…..,” a gentler version of the sledgehammer approach.
Both approaches are product focused, “products in search of buyers.” They focus on our goals as sellers and not engaging the customer in discussions about their business and problems.
If we hit the customer at the right moment, they might say “Let’s talk….,” but we know how increasingly rare that is. But, unless the customer is very late in their buying process, we typically fail in those conversations. Too often, we don’t really understand the problem and what it means to the customer. We only understand the problem in the context of our product, consequently, we focus on our product and not the problem.
Increasingly, customers are dissatisfied with this and are choosing options that minimize and eliminate seller involvement. And if we cannot contribute anything more to the conversation, they are doing the right thing.
But Charlie and I started sharing experiences that seemed to be different. On the face, they might look a lot like the second alternative posed above, but we typically start our conversations differently.
First it was who we chose to have those conversations with. Charlie and I tended to be very focused on the types of organizations and the people in the organizations we reached out to. For example, Charlie has long been the thought leader working with very large professional services organizations. He focuses on establishing and building trust with their clients–through the sales, delivery, and ongoing support processes.
He doesn’t get diverted outside that space, even though trust is an issue in all segments.
This focus enables deep knowledge on “how things get done,” within that segment. He understands all aspects of developing and growing professional services organizations. He understands how to have high impact collaborative conversations with each.
My focus has been a little broader, but very narrow within the problem set of, technology, industrial products, and professional services organizations.
The commonality is we know which problems we are the best in the world at solving and who has those problems. We don’t stray outside those spaces.
But what about the initial outreach? We have to prospect just like every other seller.
We tend to be business or insight focused in our outreach. A typical outreach, might look like:
- “We are seeing this as a major challenge for organizations like yours, how are you managing this issue within your organization?”
- Sometimes more direct, “This seems to be an issue you face in driving your growth strategies. How are you addressing this?”
You will notice a couple of things in this. First, it is only customer focused, there is never any mention of what we sell. In fact that doesn’t come up until much later in the conversations.
What each of us is trying to do is understand an issue the customer might care about and engage them in understanding why they care, what they are doing, and what improvement in dealing with that issue might mean.
But every once in a while, we strike out. the prospect doesn’t care about the issue, it may not be an issue that impacts them, or it may be a much lower priority to them.
We’ve bet on the wrong issue, despite all our research, they don’t care!
But they keep talking to us! For most sellers, the door is slammed shut, but why do those people keep talking to us?
As Charlie and I talked about this, we realized these organizations continued talking to us, even though we had started with the “wrong” issue. There was something in the conversations that engaged these prospects. It was our deep understanding of their businesses, markets and challenges. It was the fact that we focused on the issues impacting them and their success. Even though we may have chosen the wrong starting point, inevitably, the response was,
“That’s really not an issue for us, but these are things that are bothering us…… What are you seeing with your other clients? Can you help us with this?
Some years ago, I prospected a CEO of a mid-sized tech organization. I had done a lot of analysis of their business, their investor conferences, their competition. I wrote, “[Company x] has had remarkable success and growth over the past few years. But I see a potential issue that increases the risk in continuing that growth. How are you dealing with……”
A few days later, I get an email from the CRO, he forwarded the email the CEO sent him, “This guy is interesting. He couldn’t possibly know what we are doing to address that issue, it’s still very secret. But I like the way he thinks! No one has pointed that out before! You should talk to him about [these issues].”
Even though I had focused on an issue they were currently addressing, I had demonstrated insight, knowledge, and caring in their business. And they wanted to talk, ultimately doing a long series of projects.
We don’t have to be right in our assessment of the challenges/problems our customers might have!
All we have to do is engage them in conversations they care about. If we demonstrate our focus, knowledge, and caring about their success, they will choose to have the right conversations with us.
We don’t have to be right, all we have to do is engage them in talking about what they want to achieve……..
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