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.

Welcome to the Sales Cafe, our new name for the Random Thought Generator. Until now, this blog focused, as the title implied, on ideas of interest we wanted to work out in writing. The purpose of the Sales Cafe is to focus on sales and the universe that surrounds the people who practice and manage it. This is where we spend much of our time as well. 

We aim to fill a tall order here. The blogsphere does not lack for sales blogs, but then the real world doesn't lack for cafes. Everybody has their favorites and some of them have something special going for them. That's what we hope to build; someplace special where you can stop in on Tuesdays and Thursdays for thought provoking information. Think of it as your drive-in, take-out sales blog, where you can come by to learn something, change something or try something. 

Our writers sell, market, manage, and consult for a living. They practice in very interesting and challenging environments, large and small, simple and complex, mainstream and cutting edge. We think there's a lot to share. Between us, we've covered just about every industry and just about every position in sales and marketing, so we think the perspectives will be refreshing and most of all get you to think. 

Here at ELA, we're driven by our mission to make people smarter about their business, and we hope on your trips through the Sales Cafe you will walk out feeling smarter than when you came in.

In sales, leads are everything. Who can forget the fighting over the leads in the cult sales film Glengarry Glen Ross? Everyboday wants leads.

But what makes a lead a lead? Most define leads as potential buyers and part of the first step in the sales process. With the proliferation of virtual sales, I think the high expectations of online sales have diluted the definition of a lead. A marketing lead is not a sales lead. It could evolve into a definite prospect, but it takes a few steps to do that.

Someone who visits your Web site is not necessarily a lead. In a brick and mortar world, when people walk into a store, just wanting to look, it doesn't mean they are sales leads. Sure, it's one step above window shopping, but they may not be ready or even interested in buying then. I consider this the early stage of SHOP in the four phases of customer buying.

It works the same in the virtual world. Think of how many times you've wandered through a Web site, just to check out the site. Are you a lead? Not necessarily. Depending on your intentions, it's the next few interactions that qualify you as a lead. Downloading a free paper, adding yourself to the mailing list, interacting on the site and responding to any calls to action, those are moves that move you along the lead continuum.

Unless you are just checking out the competition (and who hasn't downloaded the competition's latest intellectual property (IP)?, if you are that interested in the product or services, you are now a sales lead. You can expect to get a call from a sales person or, at the very least, an email discreetly probing about your intentions, moving you further along in the SHOP phase of the customer cycle and then into BUY.

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.    

ELA's lead generation survey results are in!  Nearly all respondents are from or with sales organizations where they are responsible for the relationship or partnership with their customers. Everyone expects salespeople to generate new leads, every month.

The best return on time invested included local networking/public speaking and asking for referrals.  Over 80% thought the lead generation approach used was vital or important to developing trust.

Respondent advice on lead generation ideas sorted into four primary buckets.

• 1) Reward lead generation activity as part of overall sales process
• 2) Focus on the Customer in all interactions
• 3) Be professional including making and keeping commitments to prospects
• 4) Always provide value by knowing your product and value proposition

Since relationships are based on trust, then the lead generation approaches like asking for referrals, networking, and public speaking must cultivate trust between the prospect and the sales person.  Let's create a list of tips for each approach that are both effective and build trust.  I will post a short ELA RTG blog entry on each approach over the next few weeks.  You can enhance the approach by adding your comments and ideas. 

Thank you to all who participated.

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.