Gerry Robinson is a fella that gives good business telly.  I’ve blogged about his insight before.  Whilst the format of his latest show (Gerry’s Big Decision) as these things are want to do, goes out of its way to focus on the human drama of tears, tension and tantrums within workplaces, once or twice during the hour-long programme you do occasionally get treated to his business thinking.

The idea is that Gerry visits companies just hours away from folding to assess whether he should invest as a personal saviour.

Last night’s Channel 4 episode looked at two breweries.  He elected (as he pointed out, against his better judgement) to pump £150k into the Itchen Valley Brewery.

I for one viewer was surprised he did so, given several of the negative exchanges shown on camera.  We all know mischevious editing can distort the truth by 180°, but when he first suggested a change to the assembled half-a-dozen workforce, one reaction was priceless.

He wanted the Boss’s girlfriend (who’d mortgaged her home to keep the business afloat, and all employees in work) to become general manager.  One guy then brutally quipped along the lines of, “you’ve had a week and that’s all you’ve come up with?”

Gerry was visibly taken aback.  How could someone from the factory floor question the judgement of a multi-millionaire that conducts deals worth billions?  His response was to first explain how the chap should receive a slap round the ear, and then to motion that the idea is at least tried, rather than doing nothing when all agreed that to do nothing was suicide.

His follow-up talking-head comment is vital food for thought to any solution sales person in the midst of a difficult and taxing campaign:

the people who are the biggest contributors are often the most awkward

A superb analysis, and one that can be used to our advantage when trying to make something happen on a deal.  The usual approach applies.  What is it about the impact of the change you propose that really worries them, and where precisely is their genuine and desirable personal win out of what you’ll bring?

I’ve just happened across an economist’s (perhaps Milton Friedman) view of how people approach spending money.  The three variables a salesperson should consider are:

1. who is doing the spending
2. who’s money is it, and
3. who are they spending it on

So, the first scenario is You spending Your own money on Yourself.  This is where the most care in the decision is made.  Everything’s downhill from here!  So, the theory goes, the circumstance under which the least care is taken is when someone else spends money that isn’t theirs on a third-party.

You can create quite a neat matrix to show the declining attention paid to a purchase decision in this framework.

The repercussions of this are interesting.  Compare the diligence of decision making in a public sector context (like in rank 6 above) with that which you conduct (like in rank 1).

Perhaps a salesperson would be torn from this insight.  How much do you want your prospect to care about the decision?  Maybe if you believe that they are coming to the wrong conclusion (by choosing a competitor over you) you could open things up by asking them what they’d do if it was their hard-earned that they were spending on themselves.  If their decision remains the same, you could be sunk, but if it swings in your favour, then you’ve something to work on…

Last night’s pub conversation with pals, sitting outside in the rarity that was balmy England, kicked off with the latest UK recession figures.  Due to a revision in assessment of Construction industry performance, it turns out we’ve been in the slump for an extra Quarter than we first thought, and the 09Q1 dip was more severe than initially calculated.

These facts have profound significance.  Quoting from broadsheet The Independent’s analysis shows why:

Between January and March the economy shrank by 2.4 per cent rather than the previously thought 1.9 per cent. Those 12 weeks thus witnessed a more severe contraction than occurred in the whole of the recession of the early 1990s.

At 4.9 per cent [the current aggregation for this recession] comfortably beats comparable figures for the slumps of the 1970s, early 1980s and early 1990s – at 3.5 per cent, 4.6 per cent and 2.5 per cent respectively.

So this credit crunch shrinkage now dwarfs each of the last three recessions.  And we’ve got quite a way to go.  Especially if you believe the “double-dip” doom-merchants that say we’ll see a “W” shaped-graph, rather than a “U” shaped one, meaning any initial recovery will prove merely a temporary respite.

Given a gloomy outlook, the naturally perky souls that the assembled cast were decided to think of selling remedies.  The recollections of my friend that provided heavy-duty building plant during the last recession triggered my thoughts on what I remember being called “sweating the assets”.

If the solutions you sell, as many do, have two elements - the initial outlay requires ongoing attention - then diverting resource to help clients maximise the performance of their ‘asset’, so that it lasts longer and staves off any hint of any replacement purchase, could in theory allow such ‘maintenance’ revenue to take the place of lost capital equipment sales.

Such dedication we considered would go down very well with customers.  Setting up a team that devotes itself to a long-term goal of reducing client expenditure whilst unleashing even greater returns from what they’ve got sounds like a winner.

Thinking it through, the main objection we conjured was that clients might be miffed that either such a team was not already in place, or that the current set-up purports to do this anyway.

It wouldn’t take a lot of imagination and new packaging/pricing to prevent these doubts appearing.

The couple of dozen people I shared chats with over the weekend of  Michael Jackson’s death all praised Thriller as a spellbindingly awesome album.  No one had any problem telling me how much they liked his pre-light-skin recordings. As of right now, it’s impossible to avoid hearing his songs as you go about your daily routine and I have to admit to the enjoyment that creating a playlist of his songs on my ipod, ready for a long train trip to a client later in the week, gave me.

Surfing for background bereft of tittle-tattle, with genuinely interesting and fresh angles, yielded few fruitful searches.  Thankfully, one such gem came to me from the unlikely setting of the Harvard Business blogs, in the form of Michael Jackson and the Zombieconomy.  It reveals thoughts on why the music industry, among others, are flawed due to the inappropriate way in which they stimulate ‘growth’.

It immediately struck me as a trio of excellent ways to push sales forward in these credit crunch, recession times:

Change through authentic value

Firstly, it gives prospects in our b2b solution selling world a terrific analogy of why they should take the plunge and buy, should they be wavering.  The video link in the aforementioned blog post plays an audio file where one line can be paraphrased as ‘companies may know that they need to change, but do not necessarily know precisely how they can do so to create authentic value’.  And I’m sure we can pitch our solution as creating such true value.

Banish Unnovation

Secondly, there’s promotion of the idea of chasing real innovation, over what is termed “unnovation”.  If you can show (framed in this way) that what you offer is genuinely progressive for the prospect, then you undoubtedly move closer to signatures.  Two further points made here add fire.  Firstly, you must go against the perceived grain of “undercounting cost and overcounting benefit”, as well as ensuring that you do not exhibit  (the omnipresent and disgraceful) ‘indifference to whether clients are better off’.

Stop playing musical chairs

And thirdly, here’s one further delicious snippet:

“We don’t reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets.”

How does your solution reward the “creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing” that could be done client-side?

So, for at least the rest of the year, telling a story which begins “…remember the Thriller video and all those zombies dancing…” and talk about this ‘zombie economy’ can only help distinguish you from competition.

The perpetrator of the biggest known Ponzi fraud (a bit like a pyramid scheme) Bernard Madoff, was sentenced to 150 years for crimes that were “extraordinarily evil” on 29 June.  To mark the occasion, the Beeb asked the son of one of his victims (who had committed suicide as a result of losing everything) to investigate how it all happened.  The style of the documentary was to shed light by way of describing it as a “classic long con”.

I was struck by how many solution sales pitches can come across as having attributes of The Long Con.  This is clearly to be avoided.  Whilst the logical extension of part of the inference (ie. never invest in anything) must be dismissed, the call to ensure forensic due diligence is overwhelming.

The ‘3 rules of the Long Con’ are apparently:

1. If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is
2. Everyone wants something for nothing, your job is to give them nothing for something
3. You can’t cheat an honest man

In this case, red flags that suggested the investment scheme was fatally flawed included:

• Consistent monthly returns, not in themselves spectacular, but the same regardless of boom or bust times
• Every time, he’d seemed to have bought near the bottom, and sold near the top
• It was an Affinity Crime; it began in and spread throughout one specific community to which Madoff belonged
• Being on-board was pitched as belonging to an Exclusive Club (you only gained acceptance if recommended by someone already ‘in’)
• People were vigorously persuaded to keep their money in when wanting to withdraw funds
• Meticulous attention to detail in the minutiae of sending the false account statements through each month
• People rarely looked beyond the stated rate-of-return and requests to speak to dealers were denied
• A whistle-blower (a decade earlier) was ignored, sidelined and perhaps even deliberately discredited

So for us solution sellers picking the bones out of this, maybe the first lesson is not to make something sound quite so “too good to be true”.  For many successful sales people I know their natural exuberance renders this almost impossible!

I do like the compulsion this all propels to allow, even encourage proper due diligence as a mechanism to appreciably distance you from the charlatan’s charade.  As touched on above, in b2b solution selling, is there a better way of achieving this than an evaluation use of the goods or service?

During a deliciously tense Wimbledon tussle, a commentator asked 1997 Flushing Meadows Finalist Greg Rusedski what a particular tennis player should do to fight through.  He answered by passing on what every sports psychologist he’d met would say.

stay in the present

He elaborated.  Only focus on controlling what you can actually control.  Don’t think about the past and don’t get ahead of yourself.

In these credit crunch recession times, this advice seems especially apposite.  Why beat yourself up over a deal that slipped?  It’s gone, move on.  Why worry about the looming darkness that is Q4 all day long?  To dwell on possible problems may well be counter-productive.  Today is what matters, make something happen right now and tomorrow is more likely to take care of itself.

I caught a local radio interview with Sunday Times food and television critic, features and travel writer, AA Gill whilst driving down the M40.  A writer of much renown, he really came alive when putting forward his ideas on what a review should contain.  He railed against the typical outcome with the following scenario:

When you ask someone that’s just left a cinema how the film was, and they say ‘great’, what invariably happens is that upon further digging, you receive a summary of the plot.

To him this is absolutely not what a quality review should major on.  He talked in terms of portraying the emotions you experience during the item under review.  Sure, facts are important (like is the restaurant French or Italian, is the flick sci-fi or rom-com) but getting across how it makes you feel is, to him where you should be headed.

Sales stories are so similar aren’t they?  Yes, you must have a ‘fact’, preferably a cold, hard financial amount depicting benefit.  But how you get to such a punchline is vital.  Do you merely describe the steps as an ineffective narrative?  Or are you carrying the prospect along a deal-making journey of empathy, discovery and attraction?

Browsing the FT’s ‘managing in a downturn‘ video selection during a tea-break, I watched clips that discussed what Management must do during recession.

One gave the thoughts of a private equity boss, Jon Moulton.  I was frustrated that he merely narrated what he believes to be the two choices facing Managers at this credit crunch time, rather than prescribe his preferred plan of action:

“You either stay optimistic and risk bankruptcy or you go pessimistic and miss opportunity.  Most people go for the latter route, so the behaviour of people reinforces the recession and drives it forward; cutting capital expenditure, cutting out new product innovation, cutting out marketing initiatives.  These are the things that drives recession but they also mean you survive.  And people like surviving.”

Someone less prepared to talk atop a fence was Theo Papitis, for 13 years the owner of a high-street office supplies retailer.  His advice was simple; be “adventurous”.  He was excited that there are opportunities galore.  You’ve just got to find them.  His preferred starting place was to look at the business of companies that were destined to fall by way of currently being “subsidised”, a state that cannot last for much longer.

If you’re in a mindset of cutting costs, battening down hatches and ’surviving’, then surely whenever recovery comes, you’ll be less able to reap any benefits.

You regularly hear an eminent business sage say that, whilst you still have to trim (or slash) waste from your operations, during a recession you absolutely must invest in R&D style endeavours.  Only then can you guarantee longer term success.

Most of my day-job at present revolves around helping sales teams cement and maximise one particular big initiative.  This tends to concern a new product.

In most cases, the sales team has shrunk, commission plans are frozen and key accounts have dried up to such an extent that many within them are wondering how they can possibly forecast the dreaded “bath” for Q4.

Yet in each case, having a siginifcant new product, innovation or package to discuss with their marketplace is giving them something positive that contributes energy.  I feel that as far as salesteams go, innovation is key to energising a team in these tough times.  And that innovation cannot be restricted to reliance on manufacturing for the latest snazzy gizmo, but crucially, must consider package and price creativity too.

Sainsbury’s were the UK’s number one supermarket in the Eighties, only to be overtaken by Tesco in the Nineties.  They remain unsurprisingly keen to claw back their slipped ground.  Through the joy that is Noughties business reality tv, I caught a small convenience-store employee of theirs used as a guinea pig.  The plan was to see whether a person usually considered too junior for such development could be fast-tracked to management.

Thrown in at the deep end in their largest store in the country (98,000 sq ft, 800 staff, 65,000 weekly customers) his boss for this fortnight like to repeat his favourite management phrase:

“the standards you set are the standards you’re gonna get”

The definition of set here is the one which alludes to leading by example, rather than telling people what they should achieve.

This was the first time I’d heard this expression.  It’s the kind of mantra that I remember “bingo” sheets being passed around the table during my corporate time in the Nineties.  This was a derogatory act, if you’re in the dark.  Yet unlike many of those sayings, I quite liked this one.

How can you expect a prospect to instantly return your call if you took three days to answer their most recent query?

Why would a prospect be precise on data, when you’re sketchy on your prices?

What support support staff would break a neck to rush to your aid if you didn’t pull up tree trunks to help them out last time?

For solution sellers, the list can go on for a long time.

A major obstacle solution sellers face is not simply the cheaper quote, but one where a competing bid claims to offer exactly the same as you, but for way less money.

In such cases, should you be able to justify that your price premium alone unlocks the unique capabilities essential to the success of the buyer’s plan, then you’re home.

It’s not usually as easy as that though.

Another strand is to draw attention to Lifetime Values.  This involves distinguishing between Day One Costs and On-Costs.  Matters are often further complicated by the people responsible for the former not having anything to do with the latter.

I discovered today another way of gently introducing this concept to buyers in the form of TechCrunch’s iPhone app rant on Bait & Switch.

This gives insight into the classic cheaper-vendor tactic of hooking you on a seemingly remarkable low initial price, only for a myriad of previously unmentioned and expensive add-ons to be necessary as the project/relationship progresses.

Getting buyers to sit down and acknowledge the true like-for-like proposal comparison can be far from straightforward, especially when the resultant ‘hit’ would affect neither them personally nor their budgets, yet using this ‘bait & switch’ analogy could well be a winning way to move them towards this vital thinking.