Selling Professionally

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 ...

"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 le...

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 ...

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: "...

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 to...

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 ...