You’d be forgiven for thinking that being a customer is easier than being a sales person.  All the customer’s got to do is pick a supplier, right? But when the customer makes that buying decision, the risk shifts from the supplier to the customer, and the impact on the customer of a poor buying decision is usually greater that the impact on the salesperson of a lost sale.  That’s important enough to say again:

The impact on the customer of a poor buying decision is usually greater that the impact on the salesperson of a lost sale.

For a customer to be comfortable, she must be really sure that the supplier has a deep comprehension of her (sometimes unstated) needs.  Uncovering or understanding even ones own wants or desires can be an unyielding search. When that quest is filtered through the lens of another, vision is often blurred, and the picture that emerges is uncertain. In a corporate context personal and company motives sometimes collide, or at least bring with them varying nuances of aspiration, and a panoply of potential wants and needs explodes. Customers and suppliers, sometimes unknowingly, share the consequent anxiety when they meet in the un-choreographed buy-sell dance.

Many psychometric studies show that each of us has different approaches to social interaction, leadership, teamwork, and relative strengths or weaknesses when it comes to strategic or tactical bias, detail or big picture orientation, and introspection or engagement. Consider then that over the course of your business life you’re likely to encounter the full spectrum of customers or buyers who will exhibit varying proclivities for action, engagement, or precision.

Each customer will be different. Some will want to lead the buy-sell interaction; others are prepared to follow the direction of a trusted supplier. More are at their most comfortable when working in collaboration with their supplier, and it’s this latter category that is most common, and certainly most productive for both buyer and seller alike.

So, what’s the best model for customer interaction?  Unfortunately there is no one answer that works in all cases, but there is a proven method that we would recommend that you follow. A collaborative approach to fully describing the problem being addressed is always instructive, even when customers exhibit tendencies of leader or follower.

The Customer’s Challenge

Let’s spend a little time thinking about a customer who is seeking to work with an external supplier to help her solve her business problem. The challenges that are manifest here are quite commonplace.

* * * * *

Carol is a Senior Vice President with a mid-size technology company that we will refer to as TechCo.  Carol has a global role at TechCo, and having been with the company for many years, her portfolio of functional responsibilities has grown inline with her impressive capabilities. At heart though she considers herself a sales person, having started with TechCo as a regional sales representative 17 years earlier, and she enjoys her role as head of sales the most.

The way Carol tells it, she thought her request was fairly straightforward.

“I just wanted more leads. We were struggling with our numbers. The team wasn’t getting up to bat often enough. Marketing just wasn’t delivering. So, I just went to the market looking for a partner who could get me more leads.”

As Carol’s marketing team was upset that it wasn’t given the job of solving the problem, she ended up with an inbox full of potential suppliers. She got responses from the list brokers. Proposals came in from companies who set appointments for sales people. Email marketing companies, SEO consultants, and social media evangelists came out of the woodwork.

While Carol was sitting at her desk early one morning, her phone rang.  Normally Carol’s assistant Kathy would have answered the phone and screened the call.  This time however, Kathy hadn’t yet arrived in the office, and Carol was expecting a call from her head of UK sales, so she answered the phone, and was surprised to find herself engaged in a challenging business conversation about her need for more sales leads.

On the other end of the phone, Mark, the CEO of a boutique marketing consulting company, suggested to Carol that perhaps she should consider that more leads might not be the answer to her problem.  He asked her to consider that the problem she really wanted to address started with the fact that the team was struggling to achieve its revenue goals, and that in fact “getting up to bat more often’ might not be the answer.  As the conversation unfolded, Carol realized that if she was to get the best from an external supplier she first had some considerable work to do. There were four obstacles to overcome.

Carol brought together some of her top performing sales people and the marketing people to get a better understanding of the internal issues they were really trying to resolve. She needed to understand the difference between the symptom of the problem, its underlying cause, and the consequence of not solving the problem.  In short, her first task was to map out the internal issues, and she needed a way to achieve that.

As the team began to work together, it became clear to Carol that only a TechCo insider would understand the language they were using.  It was specific to the company, and assumed a level of contextual knowledge that she could reasonable expect her team to have, but it was unreasonable to expect an external supplier to speak the same language.  She needed a mechanism to explain the business challenges to a supplier.

But even if TechCo succeeded in mapping out the internal issues and found a mechanism to explain to an external party, Carol struggled with how she might overcome the uncertainty about whether the supplier understands the specific problem she was trying to solve – now that she accepted that it wasn’t really just about “getting up to bat more often”.

After much effort and guidance from Mark, Carol began to better understand the importance of clear communication between TechCo and any potential supplier. She still struggled with how the value of her efforts might be sustained and wondered how anyone could fully gain alignment between customer and supplier to avoid any current or future misunderstanding.

* * * * *

Carol’s experience wasn’t unusual.  While sales people worry about what they need to do to win a sale, they often forget that the customer may well be struggling with how to best interact with a supplier.  When a customer is buying any non-commodity item, it’s always worth considering the tasks that conscientious buyer needs to undertake to maximize the value of the interaction.  We can learn from Carol’s story.

The challenge often faced by a customer when looking to leverage the expertise of an external supplier can be summarized as:

1. No easy or established way for the customer to map out the internal customer issues
2. No mechanism to explain the business challenges to a supplier
3. Uncertainly about whether the supplier understands the specific problem
4. Need to gain alignment between customer and supplier to avoid any current or future misunderstanding

Sometimes the customer has not had the opportunity, or mechanisms, to fully consider all of the subtleties of their stated needs.  Instead of being frustrated by the apparent lack of progress, it’s worth considering whether part of the problem is the customer’s inability to overcome these obstacles.  Remember these are obstacles, not objections.

Guest Post: Paul Dilger, Director Product Marketing at The TAS Group

Having a genuinely integrated approach to your selling effort means embracing sales 2.0 resources, and that means keeping your finger on a considerable amount of pulses on a daily – and sometimes hourly – basis.  The advent of the smartphone or portable browsing device has made the management of all the communication channels easier, since while you’re heading from A to B or have other such dead time, you can clear out a lot of the small items.

Some people view the maturing of mobile technology as a bridge too far, an intrusion on their non-work time, and for them it signals the beginning of the end when work expands to fill all available time.  I find smartphones make me more productive and free my life up, but it begs a very interesting, and timely (if you’ll pardon the pun) question.

This time of year is traditionally a holiday time for us in the northern hemisphere.  It’s the silly season when the political wheels grind to a halt, the media are more hungry for content to fill their publications, and when business can be challenging since vacationing decision-makers and budget holders are incommunicado.  But what happens to our sales 2.0 activities when we’re away?  I was fortunate enough to take 2 weeks in a row recently, (what the Brits call a fortnight), the first time for about 3 years, and here is a non-exclusive list of the things that kept on moving while I was away:

• I still got emails
• I still got calls and SMS messages from people who hadn’t sent me a email and so didn’t get my ‘OOF’
• I still got my daily diet of web alerts for companies and industries I follow
• I still got my instant email alerts of post contributions to the blogs and discussion groups I subscribe to
• I still got a ton of tweets

So, as a vacationing professional, there are 2 decisions we need to make in our work-life balance:

1. Am I going read and / or act on any of the inbound communications I get, so the mountain is lower to climb when I come back, or do I save them for when I get back, or do I decide never to read them and start with the new stuff when I return?  And even more important in a sales 2.0 capacity,
2. Am I going to actively participate, ie email, post and blog (and they’re all verbs by the way), during my vacation?

“Ah,” I hear you say, “you can just schedule all your tweets and posts to go during your vacation, so there’s no gaps in your influencing activity.”  That may be true to a large degree, but the point I’m getting to is that it becomes a mindset thing.  All the research says that you need to properly check out and rest on vacation, so that you’re refreshed and raring to go when you get back.  But technology and sales 2.0 resources allow you to keep tabs while you’re away, and sneak an action or two in between chapters of the pulpy novel you’re reading at the pool or on the beach.

My own view is that sales 2.0 technologies and ways of working have intruded into vacations these last couple years, but in a good way, in that they make the immediate pre- and post- vacation upheaval more bearable, and, assuming we all enjoy our work, they allow us to stay close to those of our customers who are working.

What’s your view?  Or are you on vacation, with a ‘DNS’ sign on the front of your smartphone?

Guest Post: Paul Dilger, Director Product Marketing at The TAS Group

I want to build on one of Donal’s previous posts and start by adapting a famous saying attributed to David Packard of HP fame.  He said that ‘marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.’   And since it’s true that nothing happens until somebody sells something, it follows that sales is too important, far too important, to be left to the sales department.

Many people are in non-sales roles for good reasons.  They don’t like the cut and thrust of sales, the ring-the-bell, high-5, go-get-’em culture.  They don’t like the high stakes of such a job, and while they would take the high returns, the accompanying high risk is not for them, nor for their life situation.

Also, they don’t have the sales perspective, they don’t see what their company produces from the sales angle.  They design, make and deliver it from their perspective.  It’s how they get their job done.  Finally, and perhaps most damagingly, they don’t have a customer perspective.

Is there any difference between the sales perspective and the customer perspective?  There shouldn’t be, otherwise you’re not aligned to your customers and you don’t create anything that has high value to them and high value to you.  I’ve spent time selling, and I’ve spent time in marketing. I’ve marketed sales offerings and I’ve sold marketing offerings, so I’d like to think I’m pretty responsive and understanding when sales comes looking for my help.  But I’ve also seen many people in non-sales roles who don’t consider the realm of sales and customers as anything to do with them, and will avoid being pinned down to any kind of interaction with their internal or external customers.  ‘I’m in development/manufacturing/production (delete as appropriate), I don’t need these distractions, just leave me alone and let me do my job.’

In my first ever job after college I joined the graduate program of an insurance company.  There were trainee managers, trainee sales people, trainee actuaries and trainee IT people.  We were separated into functional teams and presented back on why our function was indispensible to the company.  We then understood why each area was essential to the running of the company, and we respected the roles everyone performed.  I never forgot that lesson.

The most successful organizations are those who recognize that if everyone is aligned, and everyone puts themselves in the customers’ shoes, then the whole is always better than the sum of the parts. You get all your arrows going in the same direction.  If your non-customer-facing departments are hiding away from customers, you’ve got problems.  If you help non-sales people feel like they’re a part of sales, they will want to help, since people like to help others in their own community. The sooner you acknowledge this and takes steps to address it, the more successful you’ll be.

You might like to try the following:

• Ask each employee what’s the one thing that really gets him or her excited about your customers.  You’re looking for passion in the answer
• Make sure your on-boarding/orientation process includes a section on what all the departments in your company do, so they understand how it all fits together, but more importantly so they get the other departments’ perspective
• Get your sales teams to present regularly your product, service or solution to your non-sales people.  ‘This is how I sell what you build’ is a perspective that non-sales people almost never have.  They need it, to better inform what they’re building
• Get your non-sales people to present to sales ‘how we build what you sell’.  Sales almost never have this perspective.  You shouldn’t make it technical, you should make them get a perspective on what has to happen when they or the customer asks for something new
• Consider giving your entire company access to your CRM system, so they can get closer to your customers
• Consider giving them anytime access to your forecast and pipeline analysis (if you can have on-demand reporting), so they understand the importance to the company, and to them, of what’s coming down the pipe, and can prioritize accordingly
• Do these 6 things regularly, otherwise you won’t change anything
  

Everyone sold themselves to get in your company.  Everyone knows that in business, pressure is good, but stress is bad.   Spread the pressure of sales throughout the company.  It’s too important to leave all the stress to sales.

It’s been two weeks since my last post, and that’s quite a bit longer than usual for me.  I’ve been on the road visiting existing TAS Group customers and new prospects.   While I never look forward to spending so much time on planes, it’s always worthwhile.  I always get to learn a lot.

I started this trip with a few thoughts percolating in my mind about challenges facing executives today, and the knock-on challenges that presents for anyone selling to executives. My meetings over the last two weeks have confirmed and further informed my thinking.

My first premise is that executives are busier than ever before. Because of the fluctuating economy, lots of resources were cut during the end of 2008 and all through 2009.  Now things are coming back, and there is more activity in the economy generally,  but the resources have not necessarily been restored, and we know that employment is certainly not back to where it was.  The watchword now is productivity.  More is being done with less, and unless you can help your customers with something that is number 1,2, or 3 on their urgent and important list, you’re probably not going to get an audience.

The second thought that I had, which is really just an extension of the first, is that to gain access, or even to get attention, your offer – for the meeting – needs to be really compelling.  Before you get a chance to tell your story, you need have figured out a way to make it really attractive for the executive to even take the meeting.

We also know that budget authorization levels require higher sign-off, and even when budgets are allocated, when it gets to the point when a purchase order has to be signed off, the signing pen must once again be wielded by the senior executive, and given the two points above, that will inevitably lead to delays, and in some cases will scupper the deal.

Increasing revenue has always been a combination of identifying more opportunities in your existing accounts, finding new accounts with new opportunities, and maximizing your conversion rate.  The input that I’m getting from our customers is that it has never been more important to have a structured way to address each one of these (and thankfully we can help with that).

Each of the senior executives I met with over the past two weeks confirmed this perspective.  They’re all really busy. They don’t want extra meetings, and when you do get there – you better have brought your A game.

In short, you better nail it – each step of the way.

Hmmm, just when you thought it might be getting a little easier.

One of the issues that I’m often asked about is how to improve Sales Win Rate.  Sometimes the question is presented as “What’s a good Win Rate?”, or “What percentage of deals that I bid for should I win?”  Of course there is really no universal answer to this question – and the reason for that is that it’s the wrong question.  In my opinion, energy is more productively spent in determining why you lose deals, and in my experience, the explanation follows a fairly predictable pattern. If that is true, then if you can identify the common attributes of lost deals, you can work to avoid deals with those attributes, or focus on how to overcome the weaknesses that gave rise to the failure. Then by definition, your Sales Win Rate will improve.

In reality there are really only two reasons why you lose a deal:

1. You Should Not Have Been There (pursuing the deal) In The First Place, or
2. You Were Outsold.

I will substantiate this claim a little later, but first I want to share some alternative perspectives.

When I ask sales managers why their teams lost a specific deal the most frequent responses include things like:

1. “Well, he wasn’t speaking to the Decision Maker.”
2. “She didn’t understand what the customer really wanted to achieve.”
3. “We should never have bid in the first place, the customer is locked into our competitor.”
4. “Our solution just wasn’t a good fit, and he (the sales person) tried to squeeze a round peg into a square hole.”
5. “The competitor had a stronger relationship with the customer.”
6. “There was never a project there in the first place.”
7. “We didn’t understand the personal motivation of the Decision Maker.”
8. “He couldn’t get the customer to understand our value proposition.”
9. “She never realized that the budget was way too small for our product.”

Responses from sales people to the same question include many of the above, but there are sometimes some additional reasons given:

1. “We’re just too expensive.”
2. “We couldn’t provide a reference because we’ve never sold to that type of customer before.”
3. “I never knew [the deal] had to be approved the technology committee.  He never told me that.”
4. “The customer just doesn’t get it. I don’t understand it – she really needs our stuff.”
5. “I never knew that the competitor wrote the RFP.”
6. “He never told me that Capability X was important.”
7. “My [internal] sponsor just didn’t have the juice to make it happen – even though he told me he did.”

For mid-to-large deals in an enterprise B2B market, the costs incurred in pursuing a sale will typically range between $10,000 and $100,000. Our research at The TAS Group has shown that it takes 50% longer on average to lose a deal than to win one.  Think about that for a moment.  If your sales team is spending more time losing deals than winning deals, what’s that going to do to your quota achievement?  Or, if you could fix the problem, what impact would that have?

No matter how you look at the reasons given above, in truth there are really only two reasons why you lose a sale:

1. You Should Not Have Been There (pursuing the deal) In The First Place , or
2. You Were Outsold.

It’s as simple as that – just two reasons. In my experience, failure is weighted fairly evenly across both. So, let’s look at these in a little more detail.

Reason 1. You Should Not Have Been There In The First Place

At The TAS Group, we discuss ways to help sales teams win 4 of 7 deals, instead of 3 of 10.  This means that you pursue fewer opportunities.  It’s not about ‘getting up to bat’ more often. In fact it’s the opposite.  In practice it means determining at the outset if your solution can uniquely and competitively add value to the specific customer that you are targeting. Of course it means research, and work, and understanding of what the customer wants to achieve, and how your solution might be applied to solve their specific problem.  This information is only useful if you understand what the competitor might be offering.  Often, it’s as simple as defining your ’sweet-spot’ customer – listing the attributes that describe the profile of the customer to whom you can competitively add value. When you hear yourself saying “We’ve not sold to this type of customer before – but I think I can make it work.” – then move on. You’re wasting your time.

If you look at the ‘lost deal’ reasons listed above, items 3,4,6, and 9 in the Sales Manager’s list, and items 2 and 5 in the Sales Person’s list fall into that category – you should not have been there in the first place.

Reason 2. You Were Outsold

Sometimes this is hard to accept. I know that in my case, if it’s not Reason 1, then I’ve been outsold. I didn’t understand what the customer wanted to achieve, I was not politically aligned in the customer’s organization, I didn’t understand the customer’s buying process, I chose the wrong competitive strategy, I failed to articulate my value proposition in terms that the customer understood, I failed to demonstrate ROI for my solution, or, more likely, a combination of a few of these.  Looking at the lists above, items 1,2,5,7,8, and 9 in the Sales Manager’s list, and items 1,3,4,6 and 7 in the Sales Person’s list fall in to this category. I’ve been outsold – someone else did a better job.

Now, even if you’ve done a great job in qualification – and that’s what you’re doing to pass the ‘Should I Be There In The First Place?‘ test, you won’t win all of the deals.  Sometimes, you will be outsold, 3 out of 4 is a realistic Sales Win Rate target.

* * *

When I express the perspective outlined here, I get a range of reactions, ranging from animosity (“Who does he think he is? He doesn’t understand what I go through to win a deal”) to guarded acceptance and excitement (“Wow, if we could actually achieve that, it would be incredible. We should give it a shot.”).

As we’ve watched our customers move to these kind of ratios it’s been really gratifying to know that we’re making that kind of difference for some.  I’ve spoken at length to those who excel on this journey, and there are a number of common attributes – some organizational, and some with respect to the tools they use to help them.  Organizationally, the companies just seem to be run better, and sales is viewed as the engine that fuels growth, and investment is commensurate with that view.  From a sales tools perspective, the common elements are a sales process that maps to how the customer buys, deep analysis of the customer’s political structure, and collaborative interaction with the customer to truly understand their business problem and what they want to achieve.

The following movie links give an overview of components of how the Dealmaker Sales Performance Automation platform is used to support these three goals.  Though, as it uses our Dealmaker product, it’s a little self-promotional, and I don’t like to do that in the blog, it’s the best way I can think of to elaborate on the areas that I think add considerable value and I’ve seen executed well .

• Sales Process
• Political Alignment – go to the 3min mark in the movie
• Collaboration