Selling Professionally

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...