During the recent economic turmoil, what happened was not so much a recession as a fundamental restructuring of the economic order. This is a good thing! It has forced us once more to focus on true difference versus positioned differentiation.  It re-aligned a focus on values and ethics, and it has underlined the value of the asset that is trust.

But, here’s the thing. Trust in business, between customers and suppliers, is at an all time low.  A recent study shows that the percentage of people who trust business dropped from 58% in 2008 to 38% in 2009. Only 29% of people trust what the CEO of a company says! Customers are almost twice are likely to take a recommendation about a product from ‘someone like them’ than from a company representative.

So, now what do you do? Well, unless you want to give up, you need to be part of the ‘recommendation chain’. You must establish trust, and the customer must see you as someone more ‘like them’, than a representative of your company.  But, the threshold is high – because in the end, you’re going to ask them for their money, right?  Being ‘like them’ breaks down some barriers, but it’s not enough.  It earns you the right to give advice that they might listen to, but the advice better be good, and for that to happen you need to work hard. I will get to that journey in a minute – but first a story.

The most successful salesperson I ever met lives and works in a small city in upstate New York. Matt has four very large customers whose headquarters are based nearby. Over the 15 or so years I’ve known Matt, he has had three different employers, but he has always retained the same four major customers. The companies are in similar sectors, and Matt is considered locally to be an expert in that industry. He is viewed as a thought-leader – even though like all of us, he’s just a bag-carrying sales guy.  Every year, Matt worked with his customers to develop their vision for the coming year and they looked to him for guidance and advice. He wasn’t playing the numbers game. He worked with his customers to develop opportunities that he can win. They viewed him as their ‘go-to’ guy to help them deliver on their business initiatives. He successfully transcended the relationship barrier to become a trusted advisor, rather than being perceived just as a vendor. He always exceeded his quota and the customer never, ever focused on price.

Matt is the perfect example of a Trusted Advisor – someone who is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Vendor, and who has advanced though the levels of Credible Source, and Problem solver on the way.

Would you like to be viewed that way by your customers? When you do, you are insulating yourself from competition, you have longevity in the account, you’ve great revenue predictability, and you’re not drowning in the madness of the ‘numbers game’.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Understand your customers’ industry and their business. If you’re to advise, you must be a subject matter expert.
2. You need to give value first and expect nothing in return. You building a relationship for the long term, and it’s only ok to ask for something from the customer when you’ve earned the right.
3. You need to be authentic, honest and fair – in everything, always – particularly if you are building a relationship based on trust.
4. You must focus on areas of mutual value, where what’s good for the customer is also good for you – in that order.  Explore the customers business strategy, understand or suggest business initiatives to deliver on that strategy, can when you find an area that will make a real difference to the customer, see if you have a solution to their problem.  Start with the problem, not the solution.
5. Choose your customers wisely, only apply the resources to customer for whom your products or services can truly deliver value.  Don’t try to force-fit your solution. It will only end up in tears.
6. Make sure that your efforts are matched by the customer’s commitment – otherwise you’re wasting your time. This forces you to interact with people in the customer’s organization who can commit or apply resources. Spending time with anyone else is not productive.
7. Recognize that some customers don’t want this level of attention – the level of relationship needs to be appropriate to the business opportunity
8. It boils down to value, and value propositions needs to be business based, not feature based, addressing the critical success factors for key business initiatives – which means you need to understand the customer’s business.

Sit in the customer’s chair and ask the question: Would I buy a – insert product name here –  from this company? If you answer that question honestly it will guide your actions.

Remember, customers don’t need you to learn about your product. They can get all of the information they need from the Internet.  They don’t need you to recommend solutions – they can get that from their peers. Your opportunity is to help them shape their needs, identify or suggest initiatives, and then attach your solutions to those initiatives. For that you need to be a Trusted Advisor. There really is no other way.

This is a fabulous book! Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay), CEO of the phenomenally successful online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos, shares his perspective about what I think of as more about the ‘happiness of pursuit’ more than the ‘pursuit of happiness’. His perspective, and their underlying principles, are at the core of what Hsieh lived by in his amazing success in building Zappos (which was acquired by Amazon in 2009 for $1.2 billion).  Happiness is that elusive concept that most of us all strive for in work as well as play. Happiness sells, as evidenced for example by an immensely successful TV advertising campaign run by a UK cigar manufacturer toward the end of the last century, with the tagline, “Happiness is a cigar”.

For readers of this blog, the question might be “What’s the happiness blueprint for the selling organization?” In selling, the traditional view was that sales people are motivated solely by money.  The more they sell, the more they make, the happier they become, the more they sell, and so on in that supposedly virtuous circle. As regular readers will know, that’s not been my view, and research shows that perspective to be erroneous. I’ve debunked that myth in a previous post.

The routes to happiness in work and play, however, have been considered separate, because they encompass such different things.  We more or less sleep for 8 hours, work for 8 and play for 8, and we preserve the division to keep our sanity and health.

Until now, perhaps.  I was fortunate to receive an advance copy of ‘Delivering Happiness – A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose’, which went on general sale yesterday.  In this book, Hsieh argues that building a company culture around the pursuit of happiness for employee and customer alike is the true route to long term success for business.  Hsieh’s book is essentially autobiographical, and charts the life of a born entrepreneur, starting as a nine-year old breeder of earthworms and moving onto other projects as soon as the interest had waned and the motivation had gone.  Throughout his life Hsieh has worked hard and played hard, but as you read the book you realize that the secret of his success is that he has taken what makes him happy and made it the basic condition of his working life.

Whether it’s rave parties, playing poker, or the bonds forged as college students, Hsieh has taken the good things from what has made him happy and put them to work.  Delivering Happiness is a joy to read.  Mercifully free from graphs or tables (until the very end where he gets into the science of happiness), it brims with personal highs and lows and flows in a jaunty, chatty narrative which is ideally suited to its subject matter.  The book is (Malcolm) Gladwellian in the simplicity of thought which got the author, and gets the reader, to the ‘aha’ moment. The book is the gift that keeps on giving, with a wealth of pay-it-forward and give-without-expecting-a-return resources to help us recreate a happy blueprint and achieve a higher calling, and they don’t come much higher than the Zappos calling of delivering happiness to the world.   And let’s face it, the world includes companies, customers, employees, investors, managers and directors.  According to the lessons Hsieh has learned and shares with us, if you don’t have the long-term alignment of all your stakeholders, you won’t find happiness.

So while planetary pleasure may seem beyond our purview, most of us have lofty goals in our own lives and business.  The ‘Delivering Happiness’ trick is to make being happy the endgame, and to establish a culture where we can follow through on our happiness goals, stay true to them, and not lose sight of them, time and time again.  So for the sales person, what matters less is the path you take.  It’s where you want to end up that counts.  And if you keep asking yourself why you want to end up there, the answer is always happiness.

It’s an overused phrase these days, but this book could change your life.  I recommend you read it, so that you make happiness your long term selling and life goal, not just your end of quarter target.

If this floats your boat, you might also be interested in posts I’ve written about ambition and trust.

We can all get so excited by our products that we forget that the customer doesn’t really care.  When we’re looking elsewhere, we overlook what the customer really cares about.  We’re aimed at what’s possible while the customer is focused on what’s broken.  More often than not, we just need to shut up about the vision, and just help the customer fix what’s broken – and address whatever is causing her pain today.

This very basic principle was brought home to me recently during a user focus session we were having at The TAS Group about some of the features in our Dealmaker 7.0 product. As we discussed one particular component (called Dealmaker Pulse) with some internal folks and some users, the debate got quite interesting. Passion is a good thing, and robust open debate (not an unusual occurrence here!) generally leads to a better overall result. Usually you learn something along the way. This time I learned, once again, the value of perspective – and the customer’s need to fix what’s broken in their business before looking at what’s possible.

First let me explain what Dealmaker Pulse does, (3 min video here) so you understand the context. Using a similar paradigm as Twitter, Pulse notifies you when something changes in a sales opportunity. It’s as simple as that. You ‘follow’ sales opportunities (and accounts and users) in the same way you follow people on Twitter.  You can also weave in your Twitter and LinkedIn feeds etc.

Because Dealmaker itself encapsulates a lot of clever sales methodology stuff, the alerts or notifications you receive are based on pretty insightful heuristics.  When Pulse tells you that a deal can be classified as ‘Verbal Order’, then that is what it should be.  If it tells you that an opportunity has gone backwards – and now you’re less likely to win – then unfortunately it’s right.

Now you might be forgiven for thinking that the sales manager who is using Pulse might be focused on the coaching opportunities that could accompany such valuable information – and of course they is real value there.  But when asked about that, the sales manager in the room, (Douglas), said “Yeah, sure that will all be great and I will get to that when I can, but more importantly, I don’t need to go looking for information on those key deals anymore.  Effectively, Pulse talks to me and tells me what’s going on. I will just follow the main opportunities for each of the team, and I will know immediately when things are happening, or things are sliding. I just don’t have enough time to keep looking for that information on each deal. Now I can stop looking.”

In practice, what we’ve already seen happening is that because Dealmaker Pulse provides notifications when things change – either for the better or worse – sales managers are spending more time coaching on the right things, but from Douglas’ perspective, that’s not the problem he solved.  Getting up-to-date objective information when something changed just wasn’t possible for him before – it was broken.  Now that fixed, he can focus on how to do something better.

For customers, broken is more urgent than better – always.

In 1995, I read a book called Discipline of Market Leaders by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema.  This publication was highly lauded, and I know I followed the hypothesis set out in the subtitle of the book – Choose your customers, Narrow your focus, Dominate your market – in each of the companies I’ve run over the past 15 years. The more specific message of this excellent book was that a company had to choose one Value Discipline, and excel at that discipline.  The choices of Product Leadership, Customer Intimacy and Operational Excellence are easy to understand, and the authors set out cogent arguments as to why one of these must take prominence; the others being relegated to less important consideration.

I don’t believe their thesis is valid any longer.

Since The TAS Group was founded (2005), I think we’ve done a pretty good job at achieving Product Leadership in the sales effectiveness market.  Our methodologies in Opportunity Management and Account Management -  rich and competitive in capability when we bought the business from Oracle in 2006 – have continuously been improved.  Our Dealmaker Intelligent Sales Performance software platform, is I believe, unique in the sustained value it delivers to our customers.  We are frequently complimented by our customers on the quality of our global network of experienced consultants who support the delivery of our sales effectiveness solutions around the world. Combining all of these (and recognizing that I’m completely biased) we could credibly claim to have a Product Leadership position. Indeed we been acknowledged as such by ES Research for each year since their ranking began. But is this enough?  I don’t think so.

Here’s the thing. For about the last 5 years, I’ve been of the opinion that Customer Intimacy, as a primary business discipline is not optional. No matter whether you’ve got the best widget or consulting service in the world, or not, providing a world-class customer experience needs to be your primary reason for being.

If you can’t afford to resource for customer delight – then you should reduce your marketing spend, and re-allocate funds accordingly.  Generating leads is a waste of money if you can’t service your customers.  In fact customer service is really the new marketing.

If, in your product development organization, you have competing product features vying for funds, you must resolve that tension by asking the question “which feature will deliver most value to my customer?” and let that be your sole arbiter for product management.

As you know, when the the volcano erupted in Iceland last month, millions of people were stranded around the world. When Michael O’Leary, the CEO of Ryanair (the low fares airline, and a model of Operational Excellence) said he was not going to compensate anyone for the inconvenience,  it wasn’t just the volcano that was fuming (sorry!). Sentiment on Twitter erupted (sorry again!) and the fall-out was explosive. (OK I will stop the puns now.) Within 24 hours there was a remarkable u-turn.

The old adage of ‘Customer is King’ is more relevant today than ever before, and one of the main reasons for that today is the rapid growth of Social Networks and the evolving development in Social CRM. Paul Greenberg (his exceptional blog is here) writes of Social CRM as a business strategy and philosophy but more particularly refers to it as ‘a company’s response to customer’s ownership of the conversation’.

If you’re to believe Axel Schultze (another wonderful resource), there is a dramatic change in the behavior of buyers, and the sale process needs to be fundamentally reconsidered – once again acknowledging that the customer has taken control – this time of the buying/selling engagement.  Axel would suggest that the old model of reference selling is broken, and that everything is determined by the customer experience, not just after a sale, but more particularly in recognition of a tectonic shift in the actions of a buyer before a sales engagement begins.

The triad of social media, economic volatility, and increasing buyer sophistication in the marketplace, have combined to  throw down the gauntlet, and bar has been raised. The discipline of market leaders is now a multi-faceted one. You need to have the best product.  To scale your business in an increasing agile environment you need to be operationally excellent. But both of these disciplines must be guided by the sustained value you deliver to your customers – before, during, and after the sale.  Product features must be prioritized in collaboration with your customers. Operational efficiencies should be designed to deliver cost savings, ease the buying process, or transfer operational benefit to your customers.

The prerequisites of survival have evolved, and the attributes of tomorrow’s market leaders are uncompromising in each of the three dimensions of Customer Intimacy, Operational Excellence, and Product Leadership – all guided by the vision of delighting your customers.

Delighting your customers is not optional.

I’m sure many of you will remember the awesome 1989 film Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones, Ray Liotta, Burt Lancaster and many more.  The atmosphere, feel good factor and endorsement of baseball as not just America’s pastime but also a metaphor for American history and life, combined to make compelling viewing, at least to my untutored cinema eye.

It contained the now-legendary whisper: ‘If you build it, he will come’ and the spine-tingling monologue from James Earl Jones.  Ray built that baseball pitch in the middle of an Iowa corn field, and people did come.  In the early to mid-90’s, this phrase was adopted (some would say hijacked) by the business community looking to make sense of how this new Internet would impact their business lives.  Website designers, web consultants, management consultants – you name it, they were there – were queuing up to tell you that, yes, if you build your website, they will come. Except they didn’t.  They didn’t know where you were.  This was Web 1.0, still a broadcasting, unidirectional medium, from provider to receiver, seller to buyer.  An online version of your brochure. Sure, it was one-to-one marketing, kinda, but the traffic was one-way.

As I write this I’m reminded of a talk in late 1997 by John Audette stockbroker, Internet marketing pioneer and a genuinely approachable man. He founded the hugely influential I-Sales discussion group in 1995 and debunked the ‘if you build it’ argument by explaining that designing your website and leaving it there was rather like erecting a billboard in your basement – no-one would ever see it.  You had to work at promoting your website, using search engine optimization, link development, and other search engine marketing techniques.   It sounds ludicrously obvious now, but at the time, and in the face of a seismic but emerging phenomenon, you needed the clever folk to help you make sense of it.

So, sales professionals and sales leaders, here we are again watching another phenomenon take shape – sales 2.0 – and looking for answers as to how we can make it work for us.  But now we live in a web 2.0 world, a collaborative world, where your customers are already listening to you, researching you, learning about you, before they’re contacting you (if you’re lucky).  At The TAS Group we encourage sales people to think about how senior buyers engage with you in projects to buy something. They’re generally engaged at the very beginning and very end of projects, but if you don’t have ‘Trusted Advisor’ relationships with them, you don’t get to hear about projects until the RFP comes through the door, and in 95 to 100% of the time that’s too late.

So if you’re in sales, I’d like to make this as blunt as possible for you.  You can’t sell this way anymore.  You can’t push product at customers.  You have to cultivate customers, help them see how you can uniquely help them, collaborate with them, volunteer advice, give without expecting the quid pro quo.  And how do you do all this?  You do it using Sales 2.0 resources, and that means social media.  With social media, if you build it, they will come, if you do it right.

Draw a line in the sand, starting now.  You need to start using social media, and doing the following things, today:

- update your Linkedin profile, tell people what you’re doing and what’s important to you.  You can even automate this.
- get a Twitter id
- get your shortlist of 20 senior decision-makers you want to sell to
- follow them on Twitter
- get an account on networks and sites where they’re active
- Read their blogs
- listen to them, find out what’s important to them
- Make sure your company has a corporate LinkedIn profile and a blog with regular, informative content

Then, and only then, start to build:
- Share your thoughts and interests, your advice, recommendations
- Help them with links to useful articles, industry reports, industry thought-leaders
- Contribute your expertise, not your fluff
- Introduce them to your other customers and subject matter experts in your company (who also need to be accessible in a web 2.0 way)
- Make it easy for them to approach you and connect with you

The established ways of marketing and demand generation are slightly broken, they don’t yield the numbers of qualified ready-to-go buyers as they used to, and they don’t cultivate the customer very well.  This is because customers are not buying like this anymore.  If you stay focused on your social media, you’ll cultivate your prospects, grow your pipeline with opportunities you know are qualified, and you won’t need your marketing department.  Anything marketing give you on top of your cultivation effort is gravy.

If you build it in a social media way, “Oh…people Will Come, Ray.  People will most definitely come.”