The Sales Café

Have you ever seen the "Will it Blend?" video series? It's a series of videos of a guy named Tom Dickson in a white lab coat using a high-powered blender to blend  objects you never thought to blend. (Check out the sacrilegious blending of an iPhone 4 here.)

I think some organizations regard blending sales and marketing in the same way Dickson throws objects into his Blendtec blender - with disdain. (A vuvuzela?)

What really is the difference between sales and marketing? Aren't we all (salespersons and marketers) trying to achieve the same goal - more sales?

If that's true - that both groups are working toward the same goal - why is there such animosity between the two groups in so many organizations? I think that the end goal is the same, but the approach and mindset are different.

A million years ago, when I worked in the publishing world, there was a distinct, and stated, difference between sales and writing/editing, a veritable "separation of church and state," as we called it. As a reporter/writer, it was a wonderful excuse to remain objective about a topic. We turned a blind eye to the concerns of the advertisers and left it all up to the sales people. We didn't let the size of advertising budgets enter our consciousness - until we got some nudging from an editor.

That separatist thinking creeps into the relationship between sales and marketing groups, creating the schism that often exists between sales and marketing teams. I've heard so many times from sales people: "I don't do marketing. I don't believe in it." On the other hand, I've heard the same from marketing types (including myself): "I'm not good at sales."

In this separatist world, the marketing group creates the content, works on sales tools and collateral, often ignoring the fact that they are really acting as sales people.

According to my colleague, Pete Krammer, sales people today must take on more of a marketing role to be successful. I believe the same can be said for marketing - to be truly successful, we need to think of ourselves more as sales people. That might mean that I extend marketing campaigns all the way through the sale to closing, not just handing off materials like a baton to the sales team.

I guess the bigger question is:  Sales and marketing, will it blend?

Here's something simple: how to read your customer's mind. Can you read it with certainty? Of course not. But can you read it with some insight? Absolutely.

Think about this for a moment: many of us rely on good psychics and fortune tellers who are right often enough to make a better living than most ordinary people. They're called stock analysts and brokers. When they're really good, we can make a fortune, or at least quite a few bucks on their predictions. How do they do it? There's nothing like a couple of well placed questions coupled with very good observation skills to predict the future.

What does this have to do with selling? Everything, really. The art of successful selling - and it most definitely is an art when it's successful - relies heavily on the skills of questioning and observation. We know that these are two pillars of selling, but what about before the sale, or aside from actual customer conversations?

Today, I'm going to focus on the most difficult customer mind-reading skill. This is the skill of preparation: studying public information, recognizing patterns, and making intelligent deductions (guesses) that more often than not allow you to peer into the mind of your customer before you ever meet them.
First, how do you prepare for a sales call? Do you psyche yourself up with positive self-talk? Do you spend your time on LinkedIn figuring out who the person is you're meeting and who you might know in common? Do you read 10-Ks and 10-Qs, shareholder letters and websites, competitive analysis and news reports?

Let's hope you're doing all of this and not winging it out there with all the other amateurs. Seriously - you are meeting at the buyer's pleasure, hoping to discover their needs and interests, so that you can earn the right to talk about your solutions. You need to be in the zone. You need to be on-message. And you need to be prepared. This is especially true during the opening minutes of an interaction with a buyer.

Download your customer's 10-Ks, 10-Qs and annual reports. In the management discussions and shareholder letters you will find your customer's view of the road behind and the road ahead - recent and long-term results, and short- and long- term goals. Did you know that you can also find out what your customer gets paid to do? Download the proxy statement and read the compensation committee report.

Now for the mind-reading part. What do the top executives get paid to do? What executive team (plus the direct reports, and the folks who report to those direct reports) ever focuses on anything other than what they get paid to do? The first answer gives you a significant glimpse into the mind of your customer. The second helps you check your assumptions.

While you're psyching yourself up and trolling LinkedIn for your next call, spend the time to research the public reporting and answer those two questions. Use your answers to prepare how you will explore your customer's interests when you meet them.

I'm interested to know how this works for you on your next few sales calls. If it does anything less than focus you and your customer on what's important to them and doesn't cause a few of your competitors to melt into the woodwork, I'll be very surprised.

Since the dawn of commerce, there's always been a thin line between marketing (telling the story of your product) and sales (getting someone to exchange something for your product). At one point in time, it was a chicken for some seeds while meeting on a dirt road. "This chicken will lay a golden egg for you." "These seeds willl grow the finest beans." (You get the picture.) Today, it's money/credit for products and services online. But we all started by telling our story. And, depending on which side of the line you lean (marketing or sales), your story might have a slightly different purpose, with a unified goal of making the sale.

I've always been sheltered from the sales side of my work. I worked on the "creative" side in publishing. The suits handled all the financial stuff, we creatives just made sure we offered the best content for them to sell. My only cold calling happened when I needed a quote for a story. It just didn't seem like sales to me. As my career evolved, I knew a lot of people who were already familiar with my work and my style. Through word of mouth, they hired me and, well, word gets around, so I get to write this column today.

You might say that I've been selling all along, that my quotas were calculated in word counts, white papers and blogrolls, that my leads have been honed meticulously throughout the years with every informant. My sales career is a work in progress.

Marketing and sales are intrinsically tied, but there is a definite space between the two. I experience it every day. Follow along as I tell the story of my journey to bridge the gap.

• Across geography and time zones
• Across business functions
• Across cultures, both societal and business
• Across hierarchies
• Across technologies

• What specific benefits does your organization expect to get from collaboration?
• Does everyone know about those expectations?
• Is there an incentive for collaboration?
• What projects, content or knowledge development do you expect people to collaborate on?
• Do your people know how to collaborate?  Do they know how to disseminate and find powerful information?
• Are your collaboration tools/technologies tuned to enable the benefits you expect?

People buy from people. Trite but true, whether it's B-to-B, B-to-C, complex or simple business relationships. Successful salespeople never lose sight of that little fact. Talk to one and ask them. Look in the mirror and ask yourself!

What complicates things is how many options there are for meeting people, from Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook to plain old networking meetings held by local organizations, and everything in-between. Perhaps no matter how much your company spends on marketing, sooner or later, the buyer is going to check YOU out, on their own, without your knowledge. They want to see if you're the kind of person they want to do business with.

Knowing that, how will you position yourself? Do you want to portray a conservative persona on LinkedIn and a cool one on Facebook? Would you rant on Twitter or "keep your powder dry" knowing that your potential customer might be shopping you instead of your company? One thing is for sure, when everybody shops the Web, your presence is required and your privacy is not the buyer's concern. 

Companies spend an enormous amount of energy and money trying to control the buyer-seller conversation on their websites. However the trip shoppers take, of their own choosing, on their way to a buying decision tells us an interesting story. When we analyze the traffic on our own site, we see people moving from the home page to the blog, to the team page and then out of the site, moving on definitely to LinkedIn and probably to Facebook or Twitter. I think this is common.

So, the moral is YOU, whether you are the owner, CEO, VP Sales, or an account executive, may have more to do with how enticing your product or service looks to the buyer than any feature, benefit or research paper that the marketing department can come up with.    

With the recession in full tilt, businesses are imploding everyday. But implosion has some positives. Dilapidated systems, out of date process, unsafe business practices get updated and values recover. Improvements come out of the dust and rubble with planning and appropriate reactions to the current state. 

Have you watched any of your customers' business implode? If you've been paying attention, you know the reasons businesses are failing.

• Specifically, what business challenge is hurting your customer?  (“The recession” is not a specific-enough answer.)
• How would you counsel the leaders in the organization to take a different path?
• What is threatening the leaders of the organization?
• How would your service help minimize or eliminate these threats?
• What are the long term benefits?
• How can your customer implement your service and realize benefits quickly? 
  

Outside-In selling -- may the best product win . . . not always!
by Jeff Williams

Second in a Series
As part of the on-going discussion about how an Outside-In sales organization operates, let’s talk for a moment about the importance of the product. 

Many companies -- more than would like to admit it -- believe that customers buy from them because they have the best product in the market.  Well, in some cases (like advanced technology) this philosophy can appear to work for a while, luring the unwitting company down the road of complacency (best case), or the road of arrogance (worst case).  In either situation, the sales successes that are enjoyed early in the game tend to disappear, leaving sales management scratching their heads and asking, “What happened to our lead?”  

The piece that can be easily overlooked during the “we have the best product in the market” exuberance phase is that customers rarely buy based upon who has the best product.  Instead, we find that they are more often looking for a supplier who demonstrates a true understanding of their business and can help them solve underlying business problems.  And, solving complex business problems requires more staying power than simply having the current hot product.  

An Outside-In sales organization builds an understanding of the customer through active listening, and finds ways to strengthen the relationship with the customer over time.  By building trust with the customer, the Outside-In sales team can effectively remove perceived risk in the customer’s purchase decision-making process.  Whether the sale is for something as simple as a single copy machine for the shipping dock, or as complex as a new company-wide accounts payable system, the customer is interested in a lot more than just the initial purchase.  Aspects like long-term reliability, serviceability, and alignment to company values can all play a big role.  Many times the deciding factor comes down to something as simple as how easy it is to “do business” with you.  Rather than the performance attributes or feature set of your product, a mundane thing such as flexible credit terms that fit the customer’s buying process could spell the difference between Deal or No Deal.  

As a case in point: a Fortune 50 computer company I worked for was being consistently beaten by its arch rival in the scientific server market place. Despite having a superior product, customers were beginning to turn to the competitor as a better alternative, and this was causing some consternation for our sales and marketing organization, since we could not fathom why customers were gravitating towards a clearly inferior product. Well, as it turned out, our quoting process had become so bureaucratic that turn around time on new quotes had grown to longer than 14 days. By asking customers what was important in making their purchase decision, our competitor discovered our Achilles heel, and quickly developed a streamlined quoting process that could produce a quote to customers in less than 48 hours. Needless to say, the competition continued to take away market share until we woke up and addressed the real underlying issue. Thus, by steadfastly staying in tune with the unique needs of customers, the Outside-In sales organization – in this case, our competitor – stayed one step ahead of us, even though we had the best product.

I would love to learn about your own experiences with an Outside-In sales organization, so please let me know your thoughts, and what examples you have seen.

• One plant has great product.
• Another plant has great product and is always reliable.
• Plant number three has great product, is reliable, and competitively priced.
• The fourth plant has great product, is reliable, competitively priced and helps your business succeed through service that makes you more competitive.
• Our final plant option has great product, is reliable, competitively priced, helps your business succeed through service that makes you more competitive AND doing business with them is easy and fun.