This is a phrase I picked up today whilst driving from a radio report about the latest UK government ‘green energy makeover’ scheme. Those households less able to fund the initial new equipment outright are to be offered a ‘pay as you save’ option.

I’d never heard such a form of words before and was immediately struck by its potential impact.

Flexible payment terms are rapidly becoming the norm in our credit crunch recession. Spreading such payments, hopefully to truly align outlay with payback, are becoming an essential closing tool.

Old leasing ideas are morphing into genuine rental. Fortunately they are now without many of the famous sharp finance practices of yore. These include an extra Quarter’s payment tagged onto the end, a disguise of the true rate (like by blurring Cap and Op Ex boundaries), larger deposits or final settlement payments conjured up and initial period discounting.

Similar phrases are part of the business lexicon. In the UK, we’ve had PAYE to soften personal tax obligations (pay-as-you-earn). And for several years now many industries have been moving towards a kind of pay-per-click model, which folklore suggests Xerox pioneered, adapted for virtually any pay-as-you-use situation.

What I like about the “save” element is the obvious linkage with cutting costs. Solution sales are often about enabling buyers to make money. Yet this type of pay-as-you-make-money slant I feel many people would find tricky to happily attribute realistic results to. Whereas focusing on the savings could be simple, especially for any outsource or new process sale.

In which case, when you initially present your prices to a new prospect, rather than headline the slide or sheet something safe and “professional”, or even politically correct (like Investment Schedule), why not instead label it in this eye-catching way?

I was intrigued to come across a doted angel investor’s tips for how the so-called ‘real-time’ social web can make money. This is of interest primarily to anyone interested in how on earth Twitter can capitalise on its bumble-bee deafening buzz.

His top ten revenue creating avenues (isn’t monetisation such a cumbersome word?) is the kind that usually throws up the irritatingly familiar “it’s all just common sense” reactions from those miffed at their peripheral disengagement. Yet I fancy that you’d be hard-pressed to find another commentator (or in this chap’s case, participator) that goes beyond the oft-trumpeted Ads and Account Charging ideas.

It made me think of the biggest challenge to salespeople today, selling in a downturn of course, and whether you could create a similar top ten of things that you should do right now that (and here’s the crucial thing) you wouldn’t necessarily do during good times.

It’s a tough task, especially when seeking to avoid the sales cynics (and I bet we all know several!) responding in those dismissive “common sense” tones.  Nevertheless, it’s an idea with much merit I feel, so here goes, my top ten selling tasks for our credit crunch recession times. Even if you disagree with the specific applicability of one or two, hopefully there’ll be enough here from my quick few minutes thought I managed to devote to it, to kick off a quota-busting solution sales idea or three for you:

10. Business case
Know yours backwards, have one for each client/prospect, reduce risks and switching costs and use it as a way of maintaining contact in periods when you wouldn’t normally speak.
9. Leverage expertise
What is it you personally are most renowned for? Talk to everyone about it, always offering related alternatives for purchase.
8. Add-on focus
Create an offer for your favourite add-on product and make it on every call/bid.
7. Know your gaps
Despite the growing prevalence of data mining software, so few salespeople still get a handle on this. Do your own analysis for the biggest sellers normally taken as a pair.
6. Cross-sell
We all know what up-, switch- & link-sells are, but cross-sells are often left behind. The more outlandish the fit seems, perhaps the better the opportunity.
5. Work your sweet spot
Wherever it is, you want more of the same, and can usually increase contacts and touch points where you already reside.
4. Flagship/Trophy products
What’s the one key thing that absolutely everyone should take from you?
3. Build in incentives
Who knows how long this’ll last, so think about future rebates for upgrades, servicing contracts, volume increase commitments and run-rate contracts.
2. Raise a key price
Ask your customers what they feel the best value product is and build something into/alongside it to in effect raise its price
1. Innovate with packages
Play around with bundling hitherto unattached products and new angles on commonly purchased items.

I first came across the appealing persuasion tactic of “nudging” last July.  It seems a concept with legs.  In an article on the Beeb light-heartedly debating merits of a possible anti-pork national health policy, this delightful sentence cropped up:

“When you find the muesli at the front of the breakfast counter, and the bacon sandwiches in an unmarked gloomy corner of the canteen, you know you’re being ‘nudged’.”

Their context was that if we all stopped gorging on things potentially harmful, the benefits to the individual may be minuscule (as most of us would still live to a ripe old age regardless of dietary changes) yet the impact on the nation would be enormous (as the Health Service would save millions from less illness to address).  This quandary has a name; The Prevention Paradox.

This offers fascinating insight for the salesrep.  Let me demonstrate by adapting another sentence:

“If everyone improved their [insert work related verb here] just a bit, then the benefits to the overall [company] would be large but each individual would not notice the difference.”

So the Prevention Paradox sounds like something solution orientated sellers regularly face.  How often do you suffer potentially crippling indifference from people that feel any lack of personal impact should render your proposal unnecessary, without ever acknowledging the bigger picture?

Wikipedia further suggests that our battle will be all uphill:

“awareness of this paradox means that the strength of purported benefits from a [proposal] often tends to be exaggerated, which causes people to get even more cynical and less likely to accept burdensome interventions”

Ouch.  So how do you avoid such a trap?  Well, you become a “choice architect”.  And oh-happy-days the originators of this concept have a blog seemingly recounting hundreds of ideas.

Here’s a snippet of wonderful insight I gleaned from someone working in Finance about selling to CFOs.  He was talking specifically about hedging.

“Hedging doesn’t add value, but it does manage risk and adds predictability to your business planning”

He went on to describe how major shareholders (that in his opinion had no experience of running a business for themselves) liked to be told of how companies that they invest in are doing everything they can to manage all the risk.

It’s been quite a while since I was last in the arena of selling to a CFO, but I can indeed imagine how well a pitch along the lines of the aforementioned predictability would go down.  My most frequent prospect role is the person at the sales helm, and I wonder how important to them ‘predictability in forecasting’ or ‘managing the risk of competitive threats’ would for instance be.  Quite appealling, I’d suggest.

I blog regularly that solution salespeople should defend their prices to the hilt in these credit crunch recession times and, in some cases, should even raise them.

So it was with untold delight that I came across the September 2008 musings of Accenture that not only shared my views, but also proposed additional actions along this theme.  I thoroughly recommend reading the 3,000 web article, downloading the pdf, and moulding your selling process to adopt their relevant ideas wherever you can.

Yes, they are pushing an open door with me, but are you minded to share my stance?  Here’s a few snippets to whet your appetite.  Firstly, regarding why cutting prices is disastrous:

Impetuous price cuts across the board are almost always the wrong move

By cutting prices prematurely or in a reactive fashion, companies encourage customers to regard the depressed price as typical, which makes it very difficult to raise prices back to normal levels when the economy rebounds. The result is an almost permanent loss of profit margin

When managers overuse or misuse sales promotions, profitability suffers … those short-term volume increases do not offset the much lower selling price per unit, which depresses revenues and margins

These statements reminded me of a conversation I had with a Board member of a computer firm in 1988.  Once you drop a price, it’s almost impossible to raise it once again afterwards, one reason being that a cut of 20% then requires a hike of 25% to get back to the previous level and customers refuse to acknowledge the greater percentage figure (slash by more and the subsequent rise gets ever more scarier, for instance a 30% reduction requires a later, almost unimaginable, increase of 43%).

So onto prescriptions.  They propose five areas in which you can defend your price.  Here’s a juicy morsel from each one:

Where in my product portfolio do I have a differentiated advantage? Which products will remain essential to customers throughout the downturn? Which ones will most easily lead to sales of other products?

some B2B sales efforts can be moved from promoting the discretionary features to emphasizing the fundamentals on products whose prices can likely be maintained

Pricing exemplars excel at focusing on the high-value customers that will sustain their profitability during the dark days, and then help them make gains in market share after the economy recovers.

price is not the be-all and end-all when customers are making their decisions

True deal discipline means a salesperson can’t go below a certain price range or change service features without special approval.

Someone I fleetingly know walked up to me the other day and asked that wince-inducing question, “what do you think of network marketing?”  I duly squirmed through the next five minutes of chat, trying to politely put him off the idea.

Later, I dug through my old files to find some notes I’d made back in 1999, after being similarly ambushed by newly recruited Amway evangelists that I worked with at the time.

I remember my anger at being dragged one evening from central London to a Heathrow hotel under what I felt were plainly false pretences.  So I recall that to rescue something from this stolen time, I was keen to capture any useful elements of their sales pitch that the salesteam I managed back then could build on themselves, without in any way adopting or endorsing the nightmare that is pyramid selling.  This is what I wrote on the tube journey back home to catch last orders, that decade ago:

Know Your Stuff
They were so well-versed that every point naturally flowed from their tongue.  Fluency exudes confidence. Practice until it is natural. Then practice some more. Amway provide a book for its missionaries that sets out every play. People that read from it when pitching fail.

Pretty Pictures
Rather than take 30 seconds to deliver a stodgy, difficult to comprehend explanation, think of ways to grab a pen and paper and draw lines and images that gets your message across to stick. The Amway troops are careful to avoid scribbling triangles (!) but do show off houses, with organisational chart style boxes and links, and lots of circles.

Show Them The Money
The number of times they write down and underline financial amounts is staggering. Whether it be the billions of dollars the founder is worth, or the money you can put in your pocket each month, you are constantly bombarded with bottom-lines.

Make It Relevant
Always a neat trick, every time you need to demonstrate a point, talk in terms the prospect can relate to. Rather than the average mortgage, Amway talk about your exact value of monthly repayment. So logically, rather than a mythical type of reference for example, get the name of a real person they deal with and discuss their characteristics.

Agreement Questions
The most common type of question the Amway tutors must promote is along the lines of “don’t you agree?”.

“Sitting On A Beach, Earning 20%”
You are encouraged to think of something good. A dream in actual fact. An ambition with wings, I think they said. Amway, understanding their customer heartland as they do, give you a business card with several descriptions of joy on the back. They range from spending more time with the family, to being your own boss, to not worrying about the mortgage. The idea is, that you constantly relate what you outline to achieving whichever of these goals is the number one in the prospect’s life. I like the idea of asking a prospect to choose the best benefit to them from a list at the top of the show, and constantly referring to it throughout.

Round at a friend’s pad for a spot of lunch over the weekend, I noticed a flash looking glossy lying about with the seemingly dull title Global Foreign Exchange Quarterly.  It was produced by a bank eager to prove themselves as thought leaders to their target marketplace, within which my pal as a corporate treasurer sat squarely in the middle.

As you’d hopefully expect from a multi-billion spinning casino, it had a pleasing feel, and I also liked the simplicity of its presentation.  It chose to focus on 5 Themes.  These were what they determined should create the buzz currently in their arena.  Things like long-term US Dollar depreciation and the favourable risk-reward returns likely for dear old Sterling.

For solution sellers that operate in a readily identifiable niche, this struck me as a winning approach to cultivating suspects and accelerating their journey to fully fledged prospects and beyond.

I define my market in terms perhaps a touch too broad for this.  My clients are all solution sale, b2b operations.  I think it would be better if inclusion was as tight as possible.  Along the lines of a shared marketplace and therefore buyer community for instance.  Nevertheless, when I think of the current pressures facing my potential buyers (sales leaders in the aforementioned environment) I realise that I am privy to several such ‘themes’.  Examples include:

• doing more with less salespeople
• the removal of discretionary investment spend
• preventing deals from slipping
• increased margin squeezing
• marketing support decimated
• being told top-line shrinkage is not an option

Whilst some of these could be seen as omnipresent selling factors, there is no doubt that they have amplified significance in the current credit crunch climate.

Furthermore, I am party to how several such sales leaders are traversing the choppy waters caused by them.  Sharing specific examples must surely help my cause.  Admittedly, I see this as already part of this blog’s remit.  Yet if you glean similarly valuable intel, then with the days of having marketing resource to push out glossies on your behalf being probably over, perhaps it’s time to devote an hour a week to doing this yourself.

One zero-cost way to start is by starting your own blog.  It need not be anything terribly fancy.  My experience of the blogosphere is that if you frame what you write as ’scrapbook’ thoughts, authenticity and insight could combine to create dynamite.

Then all you’ve got to do is get permission to email all your suspects a link once a month and you’re already probably several steps ahead of any competitor salesrep on your turf.

Today the English Broadsheets all put their own spin on the latest data about university trends. Starting with ‘facts’, here’s the enrolment numbers for the top eleven subjects students elected to start reading this year:

84,715 Law
76,359 Psychology
69,952 Medicine
66,544 Design
59,895 Nursing
55,500 English
54,838 Management
51,317 Business & Admin Studies Combinations
47,985 Business Studies
46,709 Economics
45,924 History

So Law is number one. But wait. As someone who’s first degree was in business, there are three separate entries that really ought be considered as a single entity. In which case, the proper rankings need to be redrawn.  Business should clearly be Number One, brimming with 154,140 students signing up for higher education commerce orientated pursuit.

Put another way, with the number of 18-yr olds currently estimated at around ¾m in the UK, then incredibly, one on five of the entire population in that age bracket take Business.

One article I read on this cited the previously unheralded Chicester Business Studies course as boasting the highest student satisfaction.  Intrigued, I found their syllabus. I was sorely disappointed to find it looked no different to that upon which I embarked over twenty years ago.

Granted, the ‘optional modules’ aren’t listed in full, but let’s face facts. There will be zero sales skills picked up by anyone on such a course. How can Sales as a discipline still not be deemed credible enough for inclusion? Why is it that Sales as a function doesn’t even merit throwaway mentions in passing during a Marketing lecture? Indeed, why is Sales considered by academia as simply an irritating extension of a marketing department that can be safely ignored?

This strikes me as all so wrong. It would be easy to breakdown “selling” into a modular format for a term’s worth of study. Two strands - theory and skills - would be an obvious starting point.

Knowing about funnel management, for instance, political mapping, proposal creation, and (dare I say it) closing would all prove way, way more beneficial in my humble experience than say, Operations Management or Strategic Human Resources.

I tend to call around a salesteam before I train them when called upon by one of my customers to run such a session.  I usually ask whether there’s any skill or topic they’d be keen to have a refresher on or even be introduced to afresh, that I may be able to touch on too. Last time I did so, with around a dozen salespeople, I got enough steers to fill an entire semester. If only Universities understood this…

Scot Andy Murray seems a highly focused tennis player unencumbered by the demands of rolling news and celebrity tittle tattle editors.  After losing his Wimbledon semi to Roddick, it seems he was asked in his press conference (quarter of an hour after defeat) whether he’d be able to “move on”.  His response was a lesson in how any sales person faced with handling the loss of their year’s ‘whale of a deal’ should perhaps think.

“I’ll move on very, very quickly and go and work on my game and improve and come back stronger. That’s a pathetic attitude to have, if you lose one match and you go away and, you know, let it ruin your year.”

His point went on to detail that this was merely one event, he’d still done well, and would be certain to give himself championship chances at other Slams.

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 mischievous 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?