I met up with a friend having his pad renovated by an impressively diligent Polish team. He was chuffed that, as a freebie, they’d offer to do an extra day’s work to help him finish the final painting touch-ups.

I wondered how this could be, and he shared his belief that it was down to two things:

1. when things had gone wrong, he hadn’t ranted and raved, but sought a mutually generated solution
2. when half-way through, he’d given each a bottle of quality vodka as a thanks

When I myself had similar work conducted a couple of years back, I coincidentally deployed the same tactics. The latter act particularly intrigued me. The gift I’d provided was (unfortunately!) a Man U footie shirt, causing much amusement when the daughter of the foreman smilingly decided to commandeer her Dad’s.

It reminded me that there are times during the middle of a long campaign, or sales project generally, when taking stock in this way could be a winner. ‘Here’s where we are. Here’s where we need to be.’ A little gesture can re-invigorate tired, wandering minds.

Many solution sellers inhabit the world of IT sales.  I was talking to a coder friend of mine (with a Masters degree in his craft) about what’s currently going down in his world when buying such technology.  He told me about a neat 3-part evaluation process.  I instantly thought that alignment with it could well aid the selling of such wares.

If you can score highly on these three, then influence the buying process to utilise this framework accordingly:

1. Usefulness - impact on job performance, productivity, speed, quality
2. Ease of Use - no learning lag, flexibility, clear, manageable
3. Intrinsic Motivation - what encouragement, enjoyment and engagement does using it provide related to a given task

Ouch. The Beeb film can dramas that bomb.  Coldplay can release a rubbish single.  Phil Taylor can throw dodgy arrows.  Apple can make a product no-one buys.  Hey, even Obama can mis-read his autocue.  So we all come a cropper every now and then, but even so, I was beside myself that I made a schoolboy error the other day. I’ll paraphrase the (fairly informal) conversations:

Someone I’ve known a long time told me that another person whom they knew very well, but I did not, ‘really needs solution x’.

After an enjoyable amount of front talk with this third person, I ventured that their friend had told me that she ‘really needed solution x’.

What followed set me back almost irreversibly.

“That’s not right … I’m shocked they told you that … ”

Instead of climbing the ladder, I slid rapidly down the snake.  I’d committed so many sales crimes here.  And I acknowledged six immediately.

• discipline dropping during an informal chat
• not discussing things that cause the problem first
• no value of solution sought, let alone verified
• expecting to be able to take a short-cut
• one man’s need is another man’s irrelevance
• not establishing difference between what might be desirable and essential

Knuckles rapped, lesson learned, move on and remind myself ‘don’t ever do that again’.

Rummaging through old magazines, with a view to recycling and freeing up unnecessarily tied up space during a Bank Holiday weekend, a raft of Booz Allen Hamilton’s journals presented themselves. Always partial to a touch of strategic thinking, I was delighted when one article shed welcome light on a new way to me of how to think in terms of your buyer’s decision making process. It was called Core Group Therapy (by Art Kleiner) and a simple web search uncovered that the writer was also penning a book on the matter. As preparation he further provides a neat succinct summary of the “three fundamental concerns (or purposes) [that] drive most decisions”, termed Core Group Theory.

The fascinating research findings undoubtedly offer killer insight for solution salespeople. Think for a moment about how you approach a complex sale…

How do you go about untangling the web of relationships client-side?
How do you try and separate the emotional from the logical reasons for you holding sway?
How do you match the prospect emotion to an attribute you exhibit?

What Core Group Theory gives you is a framework for understanding why a decision takes place at a level that delves deeper than traditional buyer behaviour modelling for sales situations.

Of the trio of considerations that people make when coming to a decision, the latter two are that people:

ii) want to be a team member on projects seen as ‘creative’, and
iii) follow their subconscious sense of what the ‘right thing to do’ is.

Both impressive insights in themselves, but it’s the primary factor that really got my cogs a-whirring.

The summary linked to above covers it all quickly and ably, but to re-iterate, my enthusiasm for this thinking stems from seeking to influence the Core Group. Do so, and glory will be yours. Here’s a couple of further bits of précis:

“Any organization is trying, at heart, to fulfil the perceived needs and wants of a Core Group of privileged people.”

There’s group of people to which the rest of the organisation look up to, and want to make decisions that please them. It’s neither formal in structure nor controllable by Management, but has legitimacy through respect and recognition everywhere. Understand who’s in this Core Group, tap into what makes them tick and tailor your solution to serve their needs.

“even a decision about which brand of paper clip to buy may contribute, in a tiny way, to the organization’s ultimate direction“

I’ve always been a big fan of the dashboard approach. My first exposure to it was nearly twenty years ago now. I’d got the nod on a large deal for what today is called ERP, but back then was simply ‘financials and distribution’ software. As part of the final sign-off, the chief bean counter wanted us to meet the top man. In those days, it was typical for just one PC to be in situ, even in corporations like this (a successful division of engineering conglomerate Glynwed) so it was all green text on black cubic screens. (You could splash out a touch more and have amber text instead!) As preparation, I was shown a single screen from their current system that we were replacing. It was littered with a series of boxes highlighting various figures, and was what the big boss looked at every single morning.

I went back to my techies with a printout. They were all suitably impressed. My superstar colleague, a one-time coder extraordinaire that amazingly morphed into a super new business seller, Colin Harris, spent the intervening weekend conjuring up the same intel from our demo systems. (Why hasn’t report writing got any quicker?) It demmed like a dream. A sweet and surefire deal clincher.

When I started my web-based software endeavours, I too wanted dashboard info. My intel was all tabular, focusing on client engagement, growth and development as well as our service response stats. Recently, a new business unit I launched got me thinking of more graphical insights.

Then, in a smirky aside during his latest roadshow presentation, salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff recounted when in a high-level meeting he felt envy directed at him because via his Blackberry he could get an instant handle on any figure. Turns out he has 14 dashboards across his business.

They’re such a good idea yet the reason why so few people have one, is that they are notoriously tricky to set up. Trying to collect and collate (and automate) the accurate, fully compliant, content required in real-time often proves a killer.

As a sales manager, how can you de-couple reliance on those in the field to input raw data from unearthing process and micro-management stats? How do you reconcile qualitative and quantitative measures? What is it that you constantly want to know, in real-time?

As a salesperson, what are the metrics that show the direction you’re headed, or alert you to a potential issue needing addressing? What are the alarm bells you want to hear ring on deals, and what are the tell-tale signs of imminent success?

Imagine this scenario. You meet someone involved in sales management. Their current gripe does indeed appear to render them unusually grumpy.

They instituted a kind of wiki. The idea was that the sales people in the field would create and add to the collective knowledge of the team by sharing selling best-practices incorporating assorted competitor, objection, reference and closing nuggets.

Yet, after a promising start, especially given the couple of salespeople that enthusiastically contributed, momentum vanished. Mystifyingly, the tool, and idea, flounder.

Incentives were conjured, satisfyingly outside the normal reward expectations. Pushing and nudging was undertaken by management. Yet nothing changed.

What are you to do?

If you too are familiar with this kind of story, then the main lesson is indisputable. When connection to or position within the everyday workload is neither obvious nor explicit, participatory initiatives are doomed.

Furthermore, if as a manager you can’t get your charges properly filling in their crm, then why would you expect them to post effectively to a wiki?

So, the million-dollar question is, ‘how do you glue sales knowledge management inside the daily fabric of a salesperson’s routine?’

Upon answering this, fortunes will be made - for vendors and users alike.

I’ll quickly point here to a trio of findings I’ve deduced from my decade-long experience of promoting success in this field.

Technology alone is not the answer. Significant investment must be made in utilising support staff and manual analysis to collect, collate and push through vital intel to where it may be (often urgently) required (without, critically, rewarding ‘disengaged’ salespeople).

Current systems prevent rather than enable. The most common excuse I’ve heard (by some distance) as to why knowledge nuggets are neither shared nor sought, is that management demand that so much time is devoted to filling in crm. Clearly, the gap between reality and spin here can be cavernous. Nevertheless, make daily reporting simpler, more effective and seemingly less dictatorial, and a knowledge management opportunity can arise.

Only promote specific endeavours. The vast majority of projects are so desperate to capture anything, that they try to harness everything. Success is always more assured if just one particular topic of knowledge is lasered in on at a time, built upon at a later stage.

I’ve just come across a fascinating clash of viewpoints that, quite rightly,  highlight how the slightest of nuance can make a huge difference to people.  Despite having only seen what’s publicly posted, this exchange strikes me as of paramount importance to b2b vendors in the next 24 months or so.

In the rad, new corner are Harvard Business Review authors, including ‘chasm’ disruptive thinker Geoffrey Moore.  And on the been-there-done-that stool, the company that trademarked the term ’solution selling’.

Published in March 09, the HBR article announces Provocation-based Selling as the next evolution in Sales. To provoke, they suggest telling your prospects what really should be keeping them awake at night and introducing them to a new angle on an undesirable situation.  Provocation gets defined in such terms as “different perspective”, “making waves” and “much-needed breath of fresh air”.

The main difference of opinion appears to stem from this type of conclusion:

“Whereas solution-selling salespeople listen for “pain points” that the customer can clearly articulate, provocation works best when it outlines a problem that the customer is experiencing but has not yet put a name to.”

When apparently compounded by a cheeky slap in the direction of solution selling’s face from an evidently disparaging, dismissive sidebar, the measured response provoked (sorry, couldn’t resist!) is well worth a read on SPI’s own blog.

It appears (with some foundation) that the respondent doesn’t necessarily question the merits of this new slant as much as suffers dismay that his beliefs are misrepresented by the HBR.

For instance, on one level, it’s either a useful tactic to slot into the established strategy, or alternatively, it’s a new get-right-to-the-heart-of-the-matter burn ‘em up approach.

So, first let’s look at the framework of the Provocation proposal; it’s three-part construction is, in their words:

a) identify a problem that will resonate with a line executive in the target organization

b) develop a provocative point of view about that problem (one that links, naturally, to what your company has to offer)

c) lodge that provocation with a decision maker who can take the implied action

And now, let’s consider a lovely strapline for (New) Solution Selling from Keith Eades (SPI CEO):

“It’s a mutually shared answer to a recognized problem, and the answer provides measurable improvement.”

Now spot the difference.  If ‘provocation’ is just one of many means of gaining problem recognition, then it’s a useful extra tool in the bag, but hardly a game-changing weapon.  After all, where would we have been for the past half-century without the liberal spreading of tangentially similar F.U.D. across prospects’ toasted Elevenses?

On the other hand (and I must re-iterate that I don’t have access to every single morsel of data on this matter) the premise that solution (and I use that term as a generic, substitutable with Value, Consultative, Strategic or Complex) sellers need a bit of a poke and prod in these distressed commercial times is one that I am minded to favour.  And for that, attention to ‘Provocation-based Selling’ should be drawn.

A quintessentially British media storm swelled around the latest terror plot arrests this week.

To recap, the leading anti-terrorism policeman in the land inexplicably walked into Number 10 with a dossier on the next possible plot clearly visible to the close-by prying lenses.  When blown up in resplendent digital glory, the unconcealed top sheet, headed “secret”, displayed full details, obviously now no longer secret.

And so on to rounds of television studio talking heads, expressing either dismay or support for the beleaguered officer.

The culprit resigned the next morning.  Another person who fared badly in the winds was Opposition Home Affairs spokesman Chris Grayling.  He looks a man out of his depth in such environs or, to be charitable, is in need of serious media training.

Grayling spent most of the day condemning the mistake, but always falling short of demanding the head.  When, as each interview inevitably concluded, he was pressed on whether the axe should fall, his flawed stance was brutally exposed.  He flopped and flailed with embarrassing squirm every time.

Yet this isn’t a tale about having a developed, reasonable, understandable, acceptable point and sticking to it without grandstanding.

The real brute was when Grayling encountered former socialist firebrand and London Mayor until just last year, (Red) Ken Livingstone.  The typically wily Paxman connivingly left them to it.

For further background, a recent precedent was cited where a mandarin left sensitive docs on a train and was summarily punished.

Red Ken won the debate at a canter.  Grayling ineffectively spluttered throughout.  The clinchers for Ken were twofold.  Firstly, he laid the platform with casual, calm, comfortable delivery.  This added simple credence to his position of ‘understanding’.  Second, he undermined the severity of the blunder with a simple statement (delivered in a kind of ‘come on … please’ manner), “it’s not like leaving things on a train”.  The inference was crystal clear.  The train debacle was way worse, let this fella off.

Unbelievably, Grayling failed to challenge that contention.  What a clown.  I felt he did not do so in part because he was too rigidly sticking to some unfounded dogmatic posture and was trying to tread an impossible line rather than stand up for what he knew was right.  I was so upset he missed such a cracking opportunity.  I was screaming at the telly, I can tell you.

He should have stopped to query Ken.  It was all so simple.  “How can you imply it’s not as bad as the train thing?  It’s way, way worse than that.  Intel more sensitive, implications many times larger, an entire operation had to be hurried forward, lives at risk even, etc etc.”

And so to the moral.

How many times have you been in a meeting with a prospect, and something is said that you know is not right.  Not necessarily an objection, but some statement that you know is plain wrong.  It could be just the way that they think that’s come up, a stance that could derail you.

Don’t let it sit there.  Don’t let it fester.  Don’t let the stench overpower the conversation.  When such a position arises, you must ask why it prevails in the face of the opposite opinion.  You don’t have to be outrightly confrontational.  You can simply pose a question that introduces the view from the other side of the tracks.

The BBC’s fascinating 70-min documentary, Yes We Can! The Lost Art of Oratory (first broadcast 05 April 09) provided several tips for those of us required to stand up in front of an audience and inspire them to act. Especially when given that the collective attitude towards you can often be at best ambivalence or indifference, at worst antipathy or hostility.

I got so much out of the film, that I had to watch it again on iPlayer to make sure I wasn’t missing a single trick.  There’s a lot to take in, but even adding just one of these techniques and insights into your public pitching will prove bountiful. As they chronologically appeared, my 18 take-aways are bulleted below:

1. many try by a speech to give people confidence in them, when you can be more effective making people confident in themselves (eg: ‘Yes We Can’, rather than ‘I Can’)
2. you’re audience is not there to be talked down to, they are not stupid
3. lead through eloquence
4. Anaphora is a good way to go.  It’s where you say the same word or phrase several times throughout your speech, emphasising it by repeating them at the beginning of key phrases (or at the end, like the kind of epiphora of Shakespeare’s “they’re all honourable men” swipe from Marc Antony in Julius Caesar)
5. try a Tricolon; saying something at the start 3 times that sounds similar, but each iteration is slightly different (eg: ‘they said we’d never A, they said we’d never B, they said we’d never C’)
6. appeal to the goodwill of your audience through self-conscious humility or undermining yourself (known as captatio benevolentiae)
7. talk about something by pretending you’re not going to talk about it (eg, ‘we’re not here today to talk about success A, glory B or might C’) (known as praeteritio)
8. rehearsal and practice are fundamental
9. it’s all about “delivery, delivery & delivery” (Ancient Greek statesman, Demosthenes)
10. rhetoric is soggy when people try and avoid saying something, much better to know what you want to stand for, and say it
11. set up false propositions and, without openly mocking them, knock them down
12. get a team together that can contribute, and create a ‘character’ for whom you write
13. average political soundbite length has been savaged; 42secs in 1968, by 1988 it was slashed to just 9.8secs, and in 2008, it was under 5 - consider this brevity
14. absorb the energy of an audience, but maintain discipline - stay a dignified step ahead of them
15. a perceived lack of inhibition can confirm sincerity
16. people won’t even remember 10% of what you say, it’s a miracle if they remember 4 or 5 points, so look like you mean it
17. “A lot of communication has nothing to do with the words, a lot of it is just your body language, or your tone of voice, or the way you look in your eyes.”
18. “You measure the impact of your words, not on the beauty or the emotion of the moment but on whether you change the way people not only think, but the way they feel.”

More ideas can be triggered from flicking through Wikipedia’s rhetoric glossary.

I experienced the disarming event of being ‘flamed’ the other day. As I felt sure that the flamer could perhaps modify their stance upon a moment’s reflection, I sent a courteous and considered response. The episode prompted me to look up their website, and I found a tasty morsel on a subject close to my heart. (Hopefully when they get chance, they’ll reply to my mail and look forward to that pint in San Fran!)

CSO Insights produce what I feel is an accurate portrayal of what those leading sales efforts are crying out for. Here’s a link to a telling graph:

Source: Sales Knowledge Management Priorities (CSO Insights)

Knowledge is of course, power. Beyond what this noble graph states, is the huge disconnect between upstairs and downstairs, or if you prefer, generals and infantry.  (I refer specifically to ranks 1, 2, 4 & 6).

In short, my experience is unequivocal.  Over half of all reps do not share their bosses thoughts in this field.  This (amazingly large proportion) even go further.  They ignore any info that comes from others.   They might say in public that they want collective best-practices, CI or objection handles, but the suffocating majority will neither go out of their way to help capture it, nor will they tend to pursue its use in the field. This is crackers.

The solution is multi-headed, but one key pillar is to actively involve reps in preparing and publicly acting upon essential knowledge gleaned elsewhere. As I often recount on this topic, technology alone does not provide the answers.  Truly effective sales knowledge management is so rare because it is really tough to make it the essential on-going process within the daily sales fabric of b2b solution sales teams that it has to be.