salespodder: sales blog with musings and tips from inside sales

One of my customers many moons ago paid to join the Huthwaite ’spin selling’ programme.  Then later, they left the fold.  Wanting to keep some of the best bits on-board, they evolved their use of the concept.  They now call it NPINS.

The idea is that the initials still stand for the same questioning categories, but this prompts two key events when a rep is in front of a prospect:

Boredom Trap - A danger with Situation questions is that these can grab the lion’s share of any conversation.   Ultimately, too many situation questions that are largely irrelevant bores buyers beyond belief.  So this technique leaves them to the end.

Nub Of Issue - It can pay to dive straight in with a Needs/Pay-off routine.  Who cares if the prospect isn’t ready to open up quite fully yet, at least they know from the start you mean business.

The fella that explained this tweak to me, used an example he’d encountered the night before with his teenage nipper after he’d come in from school and chucked his bag on the floor in the hallway.  He kicked off by asking his son “how important is it to move your satchell?” to which the response was “okay, very” leading to “and why is that?” that drew a mumbled “because someone will probably trip over it…”

How often do you pick up a sales tip from a builder?  Raging Man Utd fan Salie is turning out to be a winner.  He’s renovating my pad in Cape Town.  I must admit, I’m having a bit of difficulty trying to “manage” the process. 

When the workmen talk, it’s either in their mother tongue, Afrikaans, which of course I don’t understand (apart from the odd expletive; ‘kak’ or ‘fok’!) or in English so heavily accented, it might as well be Martian. 

In addition, their idea of committing to do something is not one I even remotely share.  We agree to act “just now” and I can be hanging around for literally hours.  Even when they feign urgency and say “now now”, the wait-time can still be interminable.

Nevertheless, a quarter of the way through the project, Salie and I spoke (for the hundredth time that week) about the tiles he was buying.  At the end, he asked me if I was free the next day at any stage.  When I asked why, he replied “I’d like to come and explain everything that I’ve done and what the money you’ve given me so far has gone on”

Brilliant.  What a superb lesson in how to keep the prospect/customer on-side during any buying investigation or project delivery.

One of my customers recently had a 3-day Miller Heiman strategic selling course.  When I asked them the one thing that they took from it, their answer was unequivocal; uncovering personal gain.

Most sales people have heard of the Miller Heiman Blue Sheet philosophy, which is your account plan.  They also expound a Green Sheet.  This is for your individual call planning.  One thing vital for this, is knowing your DMU (decision making unit) and what makes them tick.

They key to this, emerged for them as knowing what the personal gain for each member of the DMU is, and how we can help make it happen for them.  When the role-playing started, it became clear this was a new avenue for them.  People came straight out with blurting “what’s your personal gain then?”  This form of words is of course, not the best approach.  Getting the answer is essential, but the trick is to get it without framing it in such obvious terms.

They came up with all sorts of ways of asking this, like “how would this help you” and “what priority does this have for you” and if high, then “how come so high?”.

Met a chap called Steve with the grand-sounding title of Head Of Strategy.  We got to talking about all the ‘menial’ jobs that marketing should do for sales, but don’t, simply because they think that they’re beneath them.

In reality, they are not menial, but they do suffer when something more ’sexy’ comes along.  The kinds of things this particular discussion included were providing relevant, succinct and timely competitor intelligence that was more than offering a mere ‘folder’ crammed full of anything they’d managed to get their hands on.

Steve was delighted he could find a service that ensured such a job would actually get done and started to talk about how he thought people that made a lot of money often did so because they took on the tasks perceived as ‘menial’ by everyone else.  And look who’s sneering now….

There’s a great analogy here with B2B solution selling in general. How often is it that you can tip the balance of a bid in your favour by taking away a lot of the hassle of delivery or implementation from the buyer, in a way no other vendor considers?  In my experience, sellers don’t talk enough about the sheer detail of what happens once the order’s signed, and promising to do the dirty work is a great way to go.

Westminster village has been ablaze with recriminations over the on-off UK election these past few days.  Now his ‘honeymoon’ is well and truly over, has Brown bottled it, destined to embarrasingly cling on to power till the end of the term, or has he flushed out the Tories strategies early, able to expose any weakness?  There’s a separate sales lesson in this too, if you think about how you next try and qualify your way through a large deal campaign….

Spurred on by this perhaps, my fave news show, Newsnight, is running features on democratic foibles from around the world.  Checking out their piece on a Japanese local council vote was a real eye opener.  (Click on the link contained within here.)

The main element that impressed me from a sales perspective, is that the backroom ‘kingmakers’ (Sensei) advised their ‘young’ candidate (he was 40 for crissakes!) to avoid talking about detail when he spoke.  Simply smile and repeat his name as often as possible.  When he met people, all they’d take from him was whether they liked him and could remember his name.

And I got to thinking what a large chunk of truth existed in this approach.  How often on say a cold call, do you find yourself on the phone having earned the meeting, next stage, whatever goodie you hoped for, and yet you hardly had to go into any depth at all about what you offer?  Isn’t it often the case that the more detail you go into, the less likely you are to prevail?

My pals consider me a bit of a poptart.  Despite my advancing years, I firmly believe it’s perfectly acceptable to be into ‘pop’ music.  My playlists encompass a broad spectrum, from the heaviest rock, to the smoochiest of divas, but pure pop pleasure is the centre of my aural universe.  During the year, the music blogs I surf have been all a-chatter about why so many acts are starting to give their music away for free.  It’s been happening via newspaper covermounts, radio-station tie-ins and most recently, the consumer can choose the price they want to pay (the so-called ‘honesty box’ promotion).

The trend is attributed to the monster that is (illegal) free downloading.  Depending on which survey you read, for every 1 CD bought, anywhere between 9 and 25 are downloaded for free on file sharing networks.  On 5 October, the first person to challenge prosecution for such activity was hit by a jury to the tune of $220k.

To me, music has a value, so I got to reading the more ‘academic’ blogs on the subject.  And of several fascinating insights that came from comments on an economist’s blog called Greg Mankiw, one reminded me of the travails I face in solution B2B selling.

From a billion dollar retail boss: “you can’t discount cosmetics or perfume, because what you are selling is hope in a jar and nobody wants [to] discount hope”

When I first started selling, I came across a fella in the business software industry that everyone joked was a cowboy.  We’ll call him Larry.  He went through a phase that when faced with a severely competitive price war, he’d say to the prospect ‘how about you pay me simply what you think it’s worth?’

And a number of people signed up on that basis.  Amazing.  I still struggle to understand this.  Why Oh Why do all markets where the product is complex and returns abundant, do they inevtiably gravitate towards commodity type price models?  The music industry’s response to file sharing and plummeting sales should be to find new models whilst simultaneously increasing the price and therefore perceived value of their product.

And next time I’m in a possible dutch auction, the longer I defend my price, the better.  My prospects surely ‘hope’ that I will help them improve in some way, so why diminish the value of such hope?

One of my current projects helps a sales team shift more of a ‘new’ product.  It was first released a couple of years back, but no-one sold it (another sales substitution story).  I spoke to one of the reps.  I must have caught him at a low time.  He wasn’t exactly joyous.  He said he had to reach a £1.9m quota from his 400 customers and that it was tough, meaning he didn’t see the need to focus on a small-value new product when he’d get his backside kicked if he did and then inevitably failed to reach his number. 

How anyone gets to keep that many customers in today’s sales environment is another mystery.  Perhaps an ‘expansion territory’ is in order?  Wonder who would appreciate a new patch with 200 of those punters to work on…?

He went on to explain, with the delivery of a chap that had said this more than once before, that there were only 4 cicrumstances under which any customer would consider change.  If none existed, he’d quickly move right on by.

I’ve met many a rep in such mood.  It always goes against the grain, the one that says reps are only successful if they are optimistic.  Yet there was something contrarily intelligent about what he said.  Here’s the 4:

1. right place, right time (new firm, move, new project)
2. cheaper product
3. better product
4. current service annoyance (present supplier messing up)

Way back in Jan 2004, a client of mine embarked on a process of field coaching.  The idea was to progress their individual’s repping skills whilst turning their sales managers into coaches, rather than process-watchers.

They had around 160 sales people, and as managers had spans of control typically about half-a-dozen, there were maybe around 25-30 of them on top.

Needless to say, the initiative never went anywhere, depsite paying exorbitant consultant fees to get it going (I think the lucky firm were called Meridien).  I’ve just come across the ‘field coaching’ spreadsheet given to the sales managers (sorry, coaches!) at the time, that they were to fill out with the rep as part of their call accompaniment process. 

If you want to assess your own performance, then pop these down column ‘a’, have the call number or type across the top row, and fill in a score (1 to 10) to indicate how you did.  Then, the theory goes, you can work out where you can improve.

One of my customers derives a large chunk of their revenue from continually churning their kit in situ around their client base.  The idea is that they sign people up on lease agreements, then before the lease completes, they’ll have a superb new innovation to swap-in, renew the agreement, and lock out competition.

I was at one of their offices where someone talked me through the way they ensure the boat to the farmyard isn’t missed, written up on a whiteboard.  The cycle is a perpetual circle with six stages.  I’ll list them starting from 11 o’clock-ish, then moving round to 1ish, and so on:

• Changes Over Time
• Recognition Of Needs
• Evaluation Of Options
• Resolution Of Concerns
• Decision
• Implementation

It struck me that with the research so well-known (that it’s anywhere between 4 and 20 times easier to sell to existing customers than convince new ones) many sales teams must have a similar view of their process.

I’ve always enjoyed attending my customer’s workshops that are run by a respected person from elsewhere in their organisation.  This is because they have instant and greater gravitas with the reps than an external trainer would, and such reverence allows them to push the reps further.  Sessions like the one referred to here, tend to be about introducing a new way of selling, or evolving how they approach selling a particular offering. 

In this case, the firm were concerned that prospects were potentially not engaging with business cases, as over the past decade, they’d most probably bought into several, none of which delivered on its promises.  The idea of this forum was to deliver a business case that carries conviction.  What I liked about the results, was that the team themselves created their structure of what was essential to have on the front page of every proposal.  Here it is:

I/We believe that (….the prospect)
should be able to (….describe pain addressed or area improved/of gain)*
by (….%, $)*
through the ability to (….describe primary benefit)
as a result of (….our primary benefit/capability/offering)
for an investment of (….$)
signed (….x)

(where * indicates 2 hard areas of focus)

Pretty good, isn’t it.