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Archives: June 2009

Jun 17, 2009 0

Textbook Buying A Car

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All salespeople are lousy buyers.  We are generally easily sold, get distracted by the sales technique of the vendor and tend to be unable to apply the mirror of the skills that make us successful sellers.

I came across a delightful five-minute snapshot of how you should go about buying a car.

Once I got over the startling revelation that there were a dozen more steps necessary than those I knew of, I became fascinated at how solution selling could benefit from considering the other side of this particular fence.

Granted, in this context the example is neither b2b nor strictly speaking a ’solution’ sale, but it does demonstrate a few key prods that can quicken your deal:

  • create the urgency, make the buyer feel that ‘rushing’ is acceptable
  • provide multiple finance options (upfront)
  • tantalise with part-exchange if you can/want
  • provide three choices
  • allow ‘test drive’
  • point out differences between ‘must haves’ and ‘likes’
  • bewilder with add-ons (have your own, less-pressured ‘ninja room’)
  • avoid (”competitive bidding”) Dutch Auctions
  • don’t fall for giving a ‘take it today final price’
  • impress with instant/current stock availability
  • know what to do when the buyer walks out

Jun 16, 2009 0

Commitment Tax

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A universal way to understand someone’s continuing commitment to you is to ask them for yet more money.  Many companies try to tie-in customers (and lock-out competitors) by setting up programmes that add extra value, typically for a small ’service’ charge for membership.

The software trade somehow got away with exorbitant and opaque annual maintenance fees for a couple of criminal decades.  I myself recall a few years ago having to provide an immediate hug whenever I heard the phrase ‘girlfriend tax’.

There are alternatives to a cash-based initiative that can keep, grow and safeguard relationships with your most treasured clients.  Rather than a cash transfer, what types of programme ever ask simply for their time?

In my early selling days, The User Group was a forum I never truly understood.  It was populated by the keenest customers my firm then possessed.  They’d run autonomously all year with the only ‘interventions’ being that my company would pay for their quarterly room hire and attend only when invited.  They always seemed a strangely happy bunch of people.

If you can put together some worthwhile plan of action that creates an on-going dialogue that asks for hours instead of dollars then I think you might well be onto something.

Jun 15, 2009 0

Focus On Impact Of Change

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Disciples of Solution Selling embrace the recognition of ‘change’ and the importance attached to determining how such changes can affect their sales campaign.

After the latest in a long and unfortunately never-ending stream of stolen elections in territories with a false veneer of true democracy, this time in Iran, I saw the wardog that is John Bolton, the bellicose former US Ambassador to the UN, deliver a typically robust performance on its wake.

The analysis of his angle was that the rolling news disease from which we suffer is wrong to focus on the here-and-now.  Consider instead what will change.  He suggested that as nothing would change it was not quite the momentous event that 24/7 news screamed out.

He said over again, think about what will change, and the answer is nothing.  The same policies would continue to be pursued with pretty much at least the same rigour.

UK Foreign Sec Miliband echoed this view interviewed in Luxembourg for an EU summit including the issue.  Paraphrasing, he said it was ‘the impact of the electoral decisions made by the rulers’ that was of interest to him.

The message is pertinent to solution sellers.  We often get caught up in the actual happening of an event.  But what we really should do, is step back, and consider how that occurrence may cause change.  And carefully assess what reactions to that change may emerge and so shape events.

Jun 15, 2009 0

Attention Scarcity

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Here’s a thought-provoking concept I read from a Frenchman’s blog, Macro Principles, quoting Herbert Simon:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

This is termed Attention Scarcity.  On so many levels, mastering this is crucial in sales; vying for prospect eyeball time, crm and sales reporting systems competing for screen real estate, the battle to determine which task has the next priority.

The message from the aforementioned blog is that mandating or incentivising people to fill in boxes is counter-productive if full and accurate cost/benefit thinking is neither shared with nor taken on board by the new sales system’s users.

I think you can go further than simply applying this parameter to software projects.  I spend a great deal of time helping salesteams sell new products and attention scarcity is certainly something they encounter when both trying to digest all the new info themselves and when trying to get prospects to take in the same.

It strikes me that a simple three-part sentence being the first thing you say could help shape success, along the lines of:

you used to do ‘x’, now if you try ‘y’, it will save/make you ‘z’

Jun 11, 2009 0

Can You Cut A Sliver?

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I was reminded just now of a thoroughly decent chap called Dylan.  I met him around twenty years ago whilst he was doing a PhD on how small businesses make strategic decisions.  He is now a leading academic with specialisations including how such small enterprises become world-class.

About ten years ago excitement grew that SMEs could genuinely break-out globally from the limitless web opportunities opening up.  Computer Weekly reported on such hopes at the time. These high-growth, less constrained micro-multinational players were termed ’sliver’ companies.

Such companies held traits that could be successfully adopted by many solution selling salespeople across their patch.

They focus exclusively on a tiny market or niche.  This leverages unparalleled expertise to discourage competition.  They push a significant technological leadership.  They tend to enjoy applicability on a global scale.  They pour huge sums into R&D.

In many ways these characteristics show one element on the roadmap to individual territory management success.  Adaptations could include:

  • be brutal with market definition, to the point of excluding potential business and maintain close relationships with each person that could buy
  • how can you demonstrate your individual expertise?
  • what is your specific technological (or procedural) edge?
  • can you tell relevant stories regardless of world-wide location?
  • what’s your personal equivalent of large R&D spend (what more can you do with your downtime)?

Jun 9, 2009 0

Standing On The Shoulders Of CEO Expertise

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I’ve spent time lately helping salespeople understand the kinds of topic that CEO-style people want to hear, specific to when they permit a prospective rep to sit before them for five minutes, and do not ‘appear’ directly involved in your decision process.

I was reminded of a time fifteen or more years ago when, with English hostelries then shamefully shackled by sharia law drinking hours, we wandered passed a new fashion outlet in Nottingham’s Hockley.  For its first day of trading it had a chap standing in the doorway encouraging customers to check out his store with the welcome “hello, I’m Ted Baker”.

The opportunity was too good to miss.  After he showed us inside, I asked him “what’s your strategic vision then, Ted?”  His eyes lit up and off he went like a firecracker.  His main plan was to have his brand-name used as a generic clothing term.  He cited the example of jeans and how (in the decade following the iconic ad where Nick Kamen strips in a launderette to Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through The Grapevine) people didn’t say ‘jeans’ in conversation, they instead said ‘Levi’s’.  He had plans to make his style of shirt into such an item, and hoped people would say things like ‘tonight, I’ll wear my Ted’.

Now granted, on reflection the question I asked “Ted Baker” (real name Ray Kelvin) I was lucky to get away with.  After all its wording was unsurprisingly fresh-faced-out-of-business-school.  Yet with a more everyday English wording, such as:

‘where are you headed with this’,

‘what’s your plan for global domination’ or

‘how will success look for you’,

the theme of the question is dynamite.

I have met the odd Chief Exec-style person that is bereft of vision, charisma or original thought, but most love to tell you how they’ll change the world.  If you can press the right button, they will divulge all sorts of vital intel that you can leverage with other people of similar standing.

One way of doing this is next time you meet the very top person in your clients, is to get them talking about where they’re going and how they’re tackling the issues they are facing right now.

Then when you’re in front of a prospect CEO, drop such knowledge liberally in to the conversation in a way that adds value to your position without breaching any confidences.

Getting a CEO to open up isn’t as tough as you might imagine.  You can use approaches like the three already mentioned, especially in a context of shaping your existing and future product delivery to them.

I also recently picked up a trio of wonderful ideas for when you’re short of time on this from (of all places) a music industry academic.  I saw that each of these requests got the interviewee thinking hard and, as long as you frame them a touch less abruptly than he did, could really uncover gold for you I think:

  • what’s you top 3 pieces of advice on …?
  • if you had a bumper-sticker for your core beliefs, what would it be?
  • what’s your Golden Rule?

And I’m sure you can build on this theme fairly easily.

Jun 8, 2009 0

Powerbase Selling

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This is an old book from 1990 written by a fella called Jim Holden. At the time, he reckoned that over half of all Chief Execs felt future growth would only come from taking business away from competition, so set to write a book on how best to do so.  Although his true moments of originality feel brief, three are worthy of reflection.

Infiltrate Powerbase
As you might guess from the title, a key theme is to find a powerbase within a prospect and sell through that.  I liked the description of how this can be found.  One good point was to find out people that have somehow ‘got their own way’.  Where are the rulebreakers? Who’s got away with ignoring Policy?  An example that sits outside the boundaries of traditional buying decision focus is if someone’s got a new employee despite a headcount freeze in place.

Fox Hunt
Then there’s the analysis of when you’ve got someone client-side dedicated to fronting their buying process.  Holden encourages you to find the “fox”.  This is the person pulling the strings, or someone that needs impressing.

Competition Traps
Two main considerations are critical.  Firstly, prepare your buying counterpart for the likely heat they’ll get from the competition (and their boss).  Ask them that now they’ve made the decision, are they ready for the competitor coming back to them or their boss and suggest that a bad decision’s been made?  The second is prepare them for what they’ll do if the other vendors come back with a price slash to tempt a change of decision.  This is so common it’s scary.  In my experience, thankfully, buyers are not swayed overall by the price falling through the floor in this scenario, but it can put back and seriously derail a sale for you.  So you must prepare the buyer for it, and the way recommended here is to lay the groundwork early on for thinking that at such non-existent margins, adequate service and back-up would not be available.

Jun 5, 2009 0

Two Influence Acronyms

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Do you have any core key viewpoints when it comes to working out the extent to which you’ve managed to persuade people to your way of thinking?  I heard someone mention their pair of such guiding principles today.  They were simply:

DIY - do it yourself

DTA - don’t trust anyone

Easy reminders of what to remember when you navigate any solution sale political waters.

Jun 4, 2009 0

Managing Dissonance

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In the rarity of English sunshine last Sunday, three of us were ambling around a village in Pennine foothills when the woman among us decided it was ice cream time.  Clearly, there’s no argument when a lady demands such a treat so I was forced to join the hunt.

But then semi-disaster.  The shop we found only had two types of lolly left; Malteser & White Magnum.  I ventured that this didn’t matter to the her, as I remembered a time when she pined for being the Malteser product manager.  Even so, she spent the next ten minutes debating whether she’d made the right decision.

Just like the cognitive dissonance experiments suggest, the vast majority of this time was spent justifying her choice, through comforting ooohs and arrrhs, despite an admiration for the clearly more blokey Magnum.

As she was once a Business School Marketing lecturer, we got to talking about the difference between the aforementioned dissonance, in this case post-purchase, and buyer’s remorse, for I’d long since forgotten any distinction.  Her answer was a useful reminder on how to help corporate buyers approach a solution purchase decision.

Buyer remorse is plainly where someone regrets what they select.  Dissonance on the other hand considers how people struggle to determine between two choices, each of which has merit. ( I think a major point is that these merits are different perhaps even contradictory).  Then after deciding they will typically frame their feelings to amplify the merits of the selected item, and lessen those of the discarded, ie. they will try to prove their decision right.

It’s worth remembering that people can choose one item, yet still find key elements of the alternative that appeal.

For a solution seller, the consequence of this is to avoid slating the competition, to understand where you’re hot or not in this context, and make sure your heat outcooks the opposition.

As I spend most of my time helping salesteams who’s product is not the cheapest, one core way of doing this is to trot off the tried-and-tested old chestnut of; “Price, Quality, Service - Choose Only Any Two“.  If you can get them resolving their dissonance in your favour well before they realise they’re about to finally ‘buy’, you’re more than half-way there.

Jun 3, 2009 0

Forward Agenda Disruption

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It’s incredible how many sales tips I pick up from people on Newsnight.  I am one of the almost two million Brits that apparently hold this single beacon of quality news analysis (as opposed to the diet of rubbish served by the rolling news obsession, this century’s new chewing-gum for the mind) in esteem.

A man I’d never normally consider citing with reverence is Peter Hyman.  He was a Blair spin-doctor from 97 to 03.  He currently worries that his beloved New Labour project is floundering to the point of possible destruction of the UK Left.

PM Gordon Brown might be many things, but a natural leader is not one of them.  He is bereft of vision and cannot communicate.  Peter Hyman’s advice has such strong resonance to sales teams battling to survive during these credit crunch recession times it’s startling.   Whether you manage a team or a single territory, framing how you perform by his two main strategic points could well be a winner:

Be Disruptive - He opined that the forthcoming cabinet reshuffle was mere window-dressing and not capable of addressing the underlying trouble.  He confided his belief that when things get tough for corporations, they pull out of the trough by being disruptive.  They shake things up, force through change, look for different things to do.

Forward Agenda - You absolutely must have one of these.  Ol’ Gord doesn’t have one.  There’s no plan for public services, schools, health, political reform.  He believes you must have a Forward Agenda.  It’s what people can rally around and shape where you’re headed.

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