Hope is not a strategy

I would be a rich man if I had a dollar for every time someone said, "I hope this deal will close this week."  Or, "I hope he will call me back today."

Hope is not a strategy.  If you want something to happen, it is your job as a salesperson to make it happen.  I don't mean that you are going to hold someone ransom or threaten their puppy to get what you want.  As a salesperson, you have tools and levers at your disposal that you need to use daily.

The greatest way for a salesperson to wield power and to get things done is to provide value in such a way that your customer willfully chooses to do what you want because you consistently and effectively ensure they get what they want.  Zig Ziglar`s (yes, I am going to quote him - he provides good insight) golden rule is, "Help others to achieve what they want and you will receive what you deserve."  If you want a customer to call you back, you have to have started your strategy long before that time and have trained the customer to know that any time he calls you, he receives something of value. 

On a shorter term basis, when you called and left the message for the customer, did you make it clear that she would benefit from calling you back?  And this only works when you know what the customer wants.  Is it information?  Is it advice?  Is it industry information that you know because you have so many contacts?  All too often, we think all that the customer wants is a discount because we have trained them to think that way.  We entice them to buy today in order to get the discount of the month/quarter/year.  What if we simply stopped offering such things and only offered other types of value?

How about the bigger things?  Like actual deals?  Is it true that once you have laid it out on the table, the only thing you can do is sit back and hope they sign the contract?  Absolutely not.  There is value in sitting back and letting silence do the work - if you are face to face and have asked for the order.  But in too many cases, we are not sitting there with a pen in our hands and said contract on the table.  So, how do we continue to move the propspect along once we have said all we have to say?

What is the most common reason customers don't place the order?  If you evaluate the situation, likely it is because they simply don't have enough information to clearly make a proper business decision to buy your solution.  So, if your client has gone silent when you expect them to place an order, go find out what they don't understand.  Figure out what value they have placed on the solution as compared to the price you are asking, and help them to find more value and payback to make it worthwhile.  Or better yet, if you have taken them down a proper trail through the sales process, walk them back along the same trail and remind them of all of the times they saw value, considered a feature/function/benefit that they could not live without, said "Ah HAH!" to themselves, or agreed to a proof that you provided to them.  Don't expect that they remembered everything you said.  Instead assume they forgot a lot of it and instead help them to relive all of the high points of the sales process.

OK, enough pontificating.  Time for some homework.  Tomorrow (I am assuming you are NOT reading this at your desk at work!!) delve into your files and the files of the salesperson at the desk next to you and drag out all of the newspaper clippings, testimonials, case studies, industry articles and so on that speak to the necessity and value of your solution.  Dust them off, catalogue them, and make sure you have a pristine copy of each one (preferably in an electronic format).  Then, contact each customer you have on the go right now and send them one of the items you just collected with a short message about how you came across this important piece of information and you thought of them and the fact that they would likely want to see it.  Don't ask them to call back.  Just send it.  A minimum of 20 of them today.  For the next 8 weeks, send out 5 more minimum per day (yes, every prospect you have going should receive more than one during this period).  And after that, do this any time for any prospect you have not talked to for too long a time period.  You are training them that you are a source of information and information is worth a lot and at the same time you are making points about why they should be buying your solution.  Then some time in the future, when you want something from them, call them and leave a message along the lines of, "I am calling because I have something to discuss with you that will make a difference for you." or some such.  If you have proven your value in the past, they will call back.  You have to produce the value of course, and if you are really good at it you will show them that taking the next step in the buying process is of value to them, in which case you both get what you want.

Bottom line is, you cannot sit back and hope the customers will do the right thing for you.  Instead, constantly be doing what is right for them and provide value to them and intentionally drive/guide them to where they ought to be.  There are lots of other ways to do this, but I have gone on too long already.  Try this one method for now and see where it gets you.

What is Solution Selling?

Over many years, I have had a recurring conversation about the definition of "Solution Selling." Note that I put it in title case. Yes, I mean a very specific term that was coined, I believe, by Mike Bosworth. All credit to Bosworth, I have not studied Solution Selling all that much, but what I did take away from it was the concept of finding out what was bothering (my terminology) the customer and then figuring out how to help them solve the problem. Very much a diagnosis and prescription process.

The conflict that comes up, however, is when salespeople (or anyone, for that matter) feels that solution selling is the act of selling the whole damned enchilada to the customer. People have this impression that solution selling is figuring out a way to make sure that the customer has one of everything, whether they need it or not, and two of most things on the price list. In my books, this is not Solution Selling, this is flogging product.

It sounds like it is a good thing if the customer buys everything. Bigger dollars. Nice commission. But, is it likely that you will get lots of customers doing this? And if your objective is to sell them everything, and the customer is bright enough to realize that they don't need everything (or your competitor is selling better than you are and is not forcing the whole catalogue on the customer), is there a risk that you will lose customers? Absolutely. They feel pressured or that you just don't understand them and they go elsewhere.

On the other hand, what if you took the time to completely understand them, what they are trying to achieve, what their goals are, and only tried to sell to them those things that you have in your kit bag that will help them to achieve what they want to achieve? Are you more likely to make a sale? Yes. Is that customer more likely to come back for more when they need it? Yes. Will they trust you the next time you suggest something? Yes. Long term will you earn more? Yes.

This is a difficult discussion when we are not all selling the same stuff, so I cannot use a common product shorthand for examples. But lets say you work at Best Buy in the computer department. A customer comes in and starts asking about computers. A solution sales oriented person starts thinking about the computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, scanner, external hard drive, mouse pad, web cam, headphones... you get the drift. On the other hand, someone who is Solution Sales oriented will start asking questions: "What kind of computer do you have now?", "Why do you think you need a new computer?", "What do you do on the computer?", "Why, in your opinion, do you think the current computer is acting like this?", "What are you trying to get done right now that is not working well with what you have?", "Who else uses it?". Somewhere along the line, if you are a smart salesperson, you will focus in on exactly what is bugging the customer. Maybe he is working with photos for the first time after buying a new camera 6 months ago. The hard drive is chock full of snapshots, and is gasping for breath. OK, you could sell him a whole new computer, but is that really the solution? Actually, a whopping big external hard drive with USB2 connection will probably give him a lot of relief. He doesn't really want a new computer (god forbid the hassle when he/she gets home with a new computer and spouse is still nagging about the $1500 spent on the camera six months ago).

In this case, sell a backup drive now, and when it really is time for the new computer, that person will come back and trust the advice.

Solution Selling is asking more questions than talking about the "solution." It is about asking, "Why" at times that other people might just take whatever the customer just said. For example, a customer buying a computer might say, "I need more RAM." Sure, you could flat out sell them more RAM, but what happens when you ask, "Why?" In the prior example, the customer may have been told by someone that more RAM makes a computer run faster. Theirs is currently slow because the hard drive is 95% full. More RAM won't do a thing for speeding up the computer. So, why sell them RAM?

"Why?" is probably the most powerful question one can ask, and is the hallmark of a Solution Salesperson. "Why is that a problem for you?" "Why do you think that will make a difference?" "Why is this happening in your environment?" "Why do you run your business this way right now?" "Why are you looking for a change?"

The next most common question is, "How?" "How do you want it to happen?" "How do you do things now?" "How hard is it to achieve the goals you have set for this area?" "How have you tried to fix the problem for yourself already?" "How effective was that for you?"

If you don't know more about the customer's problems/goals/objectives and why they are important than they do, before you start talking about your products and services, you are not Solution Selling.

Trust

"Trust me on this."

Have you heard this before? Have you heard this from someone trying to sell you something? What was your reaction?

If you are like most people, your trust in the speaker dropped. Significantly.

Trust is not something you can demand. Nor can you buy it, win it or simply find it. You have to earn it through hard work and determination.

Trust others. Be trustworthy.

Both of these are hard to do on a regular basis.

Without being a puppy dog, do you trust the management above you? Do you trust your customers to be honest with you, without you asking them to be? Do you trust your fellow salespeople to be doing the right thing for you when you are not there? For some people, one or more of these actions is jump-out-at-30,000-feet scary. I have been asked to cover for someone going out on the road, but that person invariably called in to see what was going on. He beat me to his voice mails, he jumped in on emails whenever he could. He just could not let it go. If this person wanted me to trust him, what do you think would be running through my mind? The golden rule prevails. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I could not trust this guy as far as I could throw him.

Being trustworthy is a no-brainer. But how often do you bend that a bit. A little white lie. An inflated forecast. A call note of a call that did not really happen. When is the last time you bent the policies or price list to try to get a lower price on the quote? Each one of these is a little chip off the rock of trust. Chip away at it too much, even with different tools each time, and soon there is nothing left to stand on.

If you find that people don't seem to trust you, take a look at your own actions. In both directions, are you building trust on a regular basis? By trusting others and by being trustworthy. Are you building trust in everything you do?

Goals/Challenges/Pains

For those of you who have been following my writings here and on LinkedIn, you will see that I use the term that is the title of this blog, quite a bit. The reason I use all three words is that depending on which "process" you subscribe to, you will use a different term, but I believe that many of the different processes are really talking about the same thing. If there were one common term that everyone used, then I would use it, but there isn't, so I use all three to represent the central concept.

'Nuff said about the words, what is the concept? Why this focus on goals/challenges/pains?

As a salesperson, we need to find something that the prospect will pay for. They don't want to pay for new software or a box of widgets. As I have told my teams in the past, no Audit Manager wakes up in the morning saying, "If I could buy some data analytics software today, I would be a HERO!!" No, they wake up thinking, "If I could prove that the control is not being violated, beyond a shadow of a doubt, then I will be a HERO today!!"

On a regular basis, good companies set goals and objectives. They do this because they know or expect that achieving this goal will produce profits. Most often, the goals are actually stated in terms of profits. So, if we can find out what those goals are, then we can expect that they will make investments (pay money) to ensure that the goals are achieved.

Or if they have challenges (usually people look at this as barriers to achieving goals) then if we have a solution to help them get around the barrier or to remove the barrier, then by the same token they are more likely to invest in order to achieve the goal.

And pains, well, they are just the frustrations around the barriers to achieving the goals.

So, you can see how they are all really leading to the same thing. Figure out what the prospect will pay money to achieve, what will make them a hero today, and that is what they will invest in since being a hero in business means achieving profits.

From an accounting standpoint, buying a CRM system is a cost. But buying the ability to increase revenue by 10% without increasing the sales team size is an investment.

Wow! I have gone from goals to ROI. How did that happen? The reality is that they are inextricably connected. If you are finding it hard to build an ROI or payback for the prospect, you can probably trace it back to weak goal development.

Homework for today: Go back to your customers and ask them what goals they achieved because of whatever you sold to them (or challenges that went away or pains that disappeared). Get exhaustive about it. And make sure they are business goals, not "wants" ( a "want" sounds suspiciously like a feature list, a goal sounds like an action). If the goal is not started with "increase", "decrease", "improve" or something similar, then it is not likely a goal. Get exhaustive with it and document it all. Then keep that list nearby and make sure you get your prospects to express as many of them as possible on your next sales call (without showing them the list).

The Magical Shrinking Order

Week 1: "Yes, boss, the ACME order will definitely be a big one. Very likely my largest for the year!!"

Week 2: "Yes, boss, ACME is still on target. They need one of everything we have, and two of the core item. I have thrown the kitchen sink at them. It's a doozy. Drinks all around when this one comes in!"

Week 3: "ACME is still trucking along. They are having some budget issues, so we took out the kitchen sink, but it is still going to be good."

Week 4: "Yep, ACME will buy next month. They want to spread this over the next three quarters. They felt they just could not project manage all of it at once."

Week 5: "OK, boss, we are down to the wire. They have asked for a final proposal detailing the different price levels they could buy at, so I have done a simple quote for just one of the core, a quote with some of the services, and a third option where they can get most of what we were talking about last month."

Week 6: "Well, we got the order. They took option 1 (the smallest possible purchase) and promise to come back for the rest later in the year."

Does this sound familiar?

What happened?

Do you find your opportunities gradually shrinking over time with the prospect invariably ending up at the smallest possible order size? And when they do this, is it really the best solution for them?

If the smallest option really is the best solution for them, then our conversation today is over (and I will slap you upside the head later behind closed doors for over-proposing and for messing up our forecast). But all too often, the salesperson has the image of the right solution for the prospect and ends up not selling that solution. Usually far less. There are two different actions that lead to this end. One is apparent, the other is not.

The Apparent Problem: Are you an order taker or a salesperson? If you are a trusted salesperson, operating in a consultative manner, then be a consultant. What that means is that you are the knowledge holder, the one with the answers. When you make a proposal, propose only that ONE solution that is best for the prospect. There are no OPTIONS. The only option is to solve the problem or not, and your proposal should be the ONE that solves the problem.

The Hidden Problem: This really is the source of the issue and causes the apparent problem to happen. It all starts when the salesperson is not really doing a needs analysis at the beginning of the process and as a result does not really have an opportunity to paint a value-based picture for the prospect of what the solution will do for them. Let me explain...

A salesperson who is well trained, from the point of view that they know everything about their offering, is often not patient enough to help the prospect catch up in their buying process. The salesperson is often seeing the solution even before they start talking to the prospect. And of course, SPIFFs and other incentives just get an inexperienced salesperson to focus on elements of the solution for reasons other than the prospect's. The salesperson does their initial homework on the prospect, kind of understands what their situation is, and in their own mind they apply the "perfect" solution.

And then they talk to the prospect. And talk and talk and talk. Never asking, never discussing, and certainly not working with the prospect to build the solution. Why should they? They (the salesperson) have built it in their own mind already. The prospect is just extraneous to the exercise...

What never comes out in all of this talk is WHY the solution is the best and HOW it is going to make a positive difference for the prospect. This part of the conversation can only happen when the true consultative questioning has happened at the beginning of the sale. Because the why and how parts of the discussion only make sense when they are put in relation to the goals/challenges/pains of the customer. If that has not been developed, then why and how are academic discussions only (if they even happen).

So if the salesperson is doing so much talking, what are they talking about? Features. Functions. Colors. Widgets. Options. Mips and bips. All the stuff you find on a brochure or a simple web page.

So what value is that salesperson generating? None. You might as well just mail out the brochures or aim people at your website.

How is this problem fixed? Well, if it is actively happening in an opportunity that is underway, it is pretty hard to fix a sale already in progress. You have to bring the customer to a grinding halt (probably easier than you expect because if this problem exists, your customer probably does not feel like they are going anywhere, so stopping is really easy). And go back to the beginning. Engage the customer in a needs analysis discussion and get out on the table their goals/challenges/pains. See a longer discussion in LinkedIn group "Sales Playbook!" http://tinyurl.com/dekbqb where I discuss a situation where we had to do this.

But if it is a chronic situation for you or one of your team members, then get a process going that enforces needs development and questioning very early in the process. See another very involved discussion in LinkedIn Group "Salesblogcast.com" http://tinyurl.com/dgpnb7 about questioning. The trap that newer salespeople fall into is that they think that they should have the answers, when in fact the prospect needs to hear for themselves that they themselves have the answers. Therefore, ask the questions that get the prospect to sell themselves a solution and then what you do is prove that you have the solution they just designed for themselves.

Sounds too good to be true? This posting has become too long to explain more on why this works, but check out "SPIN Selling" and "CustomerCentric Selling" for a much longer explanation. And of course I will cover this more in future postings.

Homework for today: Look at your past year of selling, and tabulate how many of your opportunities ended up as a smaller deal than you originally forecasted, or you originally expected them to close at. What would your commissions have been if every single one of them closed at the larger value? What are you going to do to earn that higher commission this year?

Three Beliefs

Sometimes selling something requires more than just one sale. At ACL, we were selling a tool that would enable auditors to completely change their jobs. Ultimately, auditors could enjoy some very significant benefits, but only if they changed HOW they did their work.

It became apparent that we actually had to make three sales in order to get the order. This is actually necessary for any new solution that will require people to change their habits.

We first had to sell them on wanting to change how they did their jobs. The differences were: have all auditors do their own data analytics work, prove with 100% accuracy whether a control had been broken or not, ask more questions and ask different questions that had never been asked before, and more. This was often the most difficult part of the sale.

Only once they saw the value of changing how they did their jobs did they even begin to evaluate their current tools. They had been taught how to use Excel and various Business Intelligence tools as well as how to submit analysis requests to the IT department. Of course they would try to do the "New Audit" with the old tools. So it was important to follow up and sell them on the fact that they would never achieve the new way of working with the old tools.

Finally, we could sell them on ACL. It came down to being able to get an order only once the prospect held three beliefs:
1). They had to believe that they should audit the new way
2). They had to believe that their old tools would never get them to the new way
3). And finally, they had to believe that ACL was the best of a new breed of tools to enable them to get to the new way of audit.

Each belief required a new sale with its own complete process.

I could quickly determine while talking to a prospect whether their salesperson was going to get an order or not, or how large the order would be, simply by asking them (the prospect) what their beliefs were in relation to the three listed above.

Take a look at what you are selling today. How much is it requiring the prospect to change how they do things? If you are selling supplies or some sort of commodity, you are not having to deal with this issue. But if you are selling a disruptive technology or a ground breaking solution, be prepared for two or three sales to actually get the order.

Don't shorten the process or you will short-change yourself.

I am sitting in an arena waiting for a kid's lacrosse game to start, typing this on a Blackberry, so please forgive any spelling or grammar errors or lack of logic in my writing. I should be back to my full keyboard next entry.

Sales Benchmarking

I have been reading about shrinking pipelines, questions by sales management and trainers on how to focus development efforts, and a number of other general ailments in sales teams. For each one, there are many different ways to approach solutions, but the central question when things are going wrong is, where do I start in order to fix the situation? Without good data on what is currently happening, it is hard to determine what you need to fix in order to achieve what you do want to happen. In my experience, starting with the metrics and numbers is the first place to go. Let me tell you a story...

There was a sales team that I had set out to provide some training for, quite a few years ago. They were all grossly under-performing. They seemed to know the product and were all really nice people, but the revenue numbers weren't good enough to support their office.

The reps were complaining that there were not enough leads. Common comment. So, I wanted to get their focus onto what they could do within the realm of their own responsibility to offset the "lack of leads". On top of that, the culture of the office resulted in about a 4 to 5 hour work day at best with a lot of really bad habits thrown in for good measure. They had had no sales leadership at all up to that point. They were winging it and most of them had never sold before.

So, we went throught he exercise of working out the metrics of their sales process. This was a matter of calculating their success rates from one stage of the process to another. At that time, at least there was a consistent milestone method for the whole company that this group was somewhat following. Working backwards from their target, I wanted them to see how many calls they needed to make in a day to hit their target. Clearly it would be larger than what they were currently doing. On top of that, I knew it would highlight other underlying problems.

The math looked something like this (this is an artificial re-creation of the situation):

Annual Target $500,000
Avg Sale $3,000

# of sales required to hit target 167 per year
% that convert from Stage 4 90%

# of opportunities needed at Stage 4 185
% that convert from Stage 3 50%

# of opportunities needed at Stage 3 370
% that convert from Stage 2 45%

# of opportunities needed at Stage 2 823
% that convert from Stage 1 60%

# of opportunities needed at Stage 1 1371
% of first calls that move to Stage 1 10%

# of 1st calls needed in a year 13,717
# of 1st calls needed each day (13,717/220) 62

That bottom number of 62 first calls per day (it really was actually quite a bit higher) of course simply blew them away. I don't recall exactly how many they were making, but 5 cold calls and 10 other calls per day was probably around the quantity for some of them.

Once this was on the table, we had something to talk about other than lack of leads. We investigated ways to get the average sale size up (their average was low in comparison to the rest of the company). If they doubled their average sale size, they could cut their workload in half. This then led to the discussion of who they are selling to (why call the small companies when you sell more to the larger ones????) and what they were selling (full implementation by selling to the VP rather than a single license sold to a practitioner) and add-ons they could add into the sale.

In addition, it forced them to look at their own individual skills with respect to the conversion from one milestone to the next.

One person might be good at getting people into a true evaluation stage but really bad at relating the capabilities back to the original goals of the customer, so their later-stage conversion rates would be way down. So, how do they fix that? That became a major part of the training.

Or another person might be really poor at cold calling, which makes all the rest of it really difficult. So, what script is needed, who/when/how should they be calling and so on then became another part of the training.

When all was said and done, they determined for themselves that by making some very pointed changes in what they were doing, they could get that "first calls" number down to a manageable quantity and still hit their targets. The complaint of "not enough leads" became immaterial because they could almost hit their targets just with the leads they were getting if they sold differently to those leads and supplemented with some very targetted prospecting of their own.

In the few months following this training, the pipeline for the group grew exponentially. They were making more calls (they were more excited and could see the possibility of success which drove them to work harder at the same time as working smarter), adding more to the solution value and talking to different people (higher up the chain). Their actual sales also began to trend up (shortening the average cycle was also part of the discussion). Unfortunately I can't trend the success any further than that because my followup training meeting with them was the week of 9/11 and shortly thereafter the tech bubble burst and the company shut that office down completely. But that is not what the point of the story is.

The real bottom line: I learned two very important lessons from this exercise:

1) Training is of no value if the trainee doesn't think they are part of the problem. They will resist and simply not change their own actions. By doing this benchmarking, it was abundantly clear that each of them had something they could work on to help themselves, and the result was a very engaged training week.

2) This benchmarking focusses attention on the spots where help and development are needed. Without the benchmarking, the training would have been a shotgun approach with "everything including the kitchen sink". On the way over to the office, I was thinking I would need about 3 weeks to get through it all. But once we did the benchmarking, it was very clear where the first efforts should be to get the greatest return on their development. The training became shorter and far more focussed. The return on investment was immediate and extreme and very clear in their pipelines.