The Sales Café

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.

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? 
  

The blockbuster sales advice article for the first half of 2009 can be found in the March edition of Harvard Business Review: In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers by Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin, and Geoffry Moore. The title grabbed my attention; the content was nothing short of inspiring.

Sales executives spend their working days in discovery with prospective customers, looking for pain, finding ways to align with customer perceptions of business challenges, and hoping to configure and sell solutions in a manner that addresses as much of the pain as possible faster, better, or cheaper than the competition. Yes, this is important, and yes, if you're really good at the process, you are most likely conducting it in a highly collaborative fashion. There may be a better approach - at least some of the time.

This HBR article pokes holes in the consultative approach in an honest and very helpful way. Though it does not negate consultative selling, the premise is sort of "post-consultative" and the approach is easy to cipher if you have good experience and business acumen. "Provocative selling" is possibly more collaborative, more consultative, and provides much more value to the customer than other approaches.

The fact is, if we have any motivation towards excellence in how we behave in the marketplace, then we are investing quite heavily in knowing a lot about our prospective customers and their business challenges before we ever contact them. If we don't, chances are we won't go anywhere with that prospect unless we're very, very lucky that day. This article addresses this particular set of behaviors on both a personal and organizational level.

Buy the magazine (or go to the library!) or just purchase the article at this link on the HBR.org site.

It is perhaps one of the most important you will read this year.

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.

When it comes to building sales, a structured 12-18-month plan pays dividends.

These days, it’s tough out there. In a lukewarm or sluggish market, it is tempting, perhaps even desirable if you have an antsy Board, to hire your way to growth. Recruiting and retaining top sales talent is a tricky and expensive proposition that only the largest organizations can afford to do well. The reality is that many successful salespeople in these environments are little more than conduits in a chain of well-orchestrated events generated by successful marketing and product development departments.

I’ve heard many sales vice presidents say, “Success has a thousand fathers.” Their success often depends on keeping feet on the street, hiring people who have strong personalities and are good at pushing product in front of customers. In hot markets, it’s hard to fail. However, despite close to 100 years of sales skill development seminars and publications, many people still push what to them looks like, and indeed may be, a hit product. But what if you don’t have the latest greatest “sells itself” product? Or if your “product” is really a service offering, what do you do with sales people who only know how to push product?

We’ve recently gotten reports from two clients that do business with currently distressed sectors of the marketplace—temporary staffing. The sales results for both companies over the past twelve months were rather startling given the doom and gloom we all read in the papers: national accounts are up 15%; there are week-over-week increases in new account acquisitions; and major accounts are up over 25. These are results that would be astounding even during a hot market, not like now, when the bread-and-butter market of their customer base (the construction industry) is lagging.
Two things stand out about these companies: their service offerings are very straightforward—providing workers—and easily copied so there is plenty of competition; and, they have both taken methodical, almost textbook approaches to developing their salespeople and sales managers. The approach has been the recipe for their success.

For those companies that don’t currently have products and services that sell themselves, acquiring new customers and growing existing customer relationships requires a consistent methodical approach—and a heavy dollop of strategy (which we won’t tackle today). This path requires planning, patience—and, most importantly, getting your CEO on board.

Here are a few of the steps toward laying out an approach that provides results:

1. No matter what sales process you choose, successful implementation requires first that you plan the journey well. Define your vision and mission with the mindset of an entrepreneur and customer’s point of view. Set solid, and real, twelve-month objectives that are measurable, and that you’re willing to stand behind. Develop real strategies that will inform your organization how to meet the objectives. And plan your projects and initiatives well, so that you stay focused on those strategies—not the shiny balls that appear along the way.
2. Train your executive and management team in your sales process first, and then train them on how to coach and manage the process. Inevitably, our initial conversation with the Vice President of Sales starts with a request to train the salespeople. Since a large part of what we do is training, this is of course a natural request. However, we find that in close to 100% of situations that we could train the salespeople till the cows come home and nothing much will change. It’s the sales managers and sales executives who must get out front of the curve, learn the process, learn how to coach the process and lead the way. Once your management team is up to speed, then, and only then, roll out your sales process and train the salespeople.
3. Even though your sales managers have become process experts, measure and pay them for their coaching capability, not their ability to rescue the deal. Your sales managers are first and foremost your coaches. Nothing kills momentum and dumbs down your sales force quicker than a team of heroic sales managers.
4. Don’t create process silos where none currently exist. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and HRM (Human Resources Management) need to be tightly linked to your company’s sales process. In other words, measure and compensate only for the behavior you desire. Salespeople are coin-operated. They will do what you pay them to do.

You should count on a period of 12-18 months from conception to full implementation. This may seem unreasonably long in a dynamic market, especially when it’s so easy to just go out and purchase a training class, but following a well-planned process and not skipping the steps will pay dividends you can only dream of today. In company after company, in industries ranging from software to staffing to agriculture, over the past 28 years, we have found that taking this type of methodical process produces both change and big results.