Are You Ready For 2012? A Quick Look Back At 2011.

Top Articles of 2011

New to the Solution Selling Blog? Or are you a committed reader? Welcome and welcome back. At SPI we are more committed than ever to be the go-to thought-leaders of the sales performance improvement industry. We are consistently looking ahead to changes in the marketplace, trends, tools and learning methods to influence our practices and programs. We incorporate research and feedback into our decisions and work diligently to forward the knowledge and skills we pass on to our clients. So in with the new year and out with the old. But… before we move forward with a wealth of new sales knowledge in 2012, let’s take a brief look back to see what mattered most to readers in 2011.

	Do You Really Understand Your Customer’s Problems? One common sales challenge I have been hearing a lot lately is that sales people are not having consultative dialogues with the customer. As a result, sales cycles become longer or win rates drop. Let me paint the picture…
	Rumors of Solution Selling’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated You can’t really blame our competitors for trying to do and say things to tarnish our brand, Solution Selling® - it’s the nature of the beast when you are among the market leaders… we take it as a confirmation of a leadership position…
	Re-Thinking Sales Training - 2011 and Beyond To maximize an organization’s return on sales training investments, sales leaders and managers need to consider three key issues before investing in a sales training initiative, as illustrated in the article…
	Selling Styles: Art or Science(A Love Story) I love my job. My primary responsibility is to create LEADS. In my career, I’ve created a few hundred thousand quality leads to be distributed across an array of sales teams. With numbers of this scale, the main issue that kills me is not necessarily the lead source, cost per lead, OR lead quality…
	Column Fodder My favorite locale is the (gold standard) that defined the qualities that I truly enjoy in a burrito - everyone else that I consider, well, they have a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, the ‘other’ restaurants offering burritos have become columns B, C, and so on in my evaluation…
	Winners Versus Losers - What Does Research Tell Us? Of more general interest is what we learned about top performing companies – companies that have significantly higher quota attainment and revenue attainment. The “best-in-class” companies outpace laggards in a number of areas, including…

Rumors of Solution Selling's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

You can’t really blame our competitors for trying to do and say things to tarnish our brand, Solution Selling® - it’s the nature of the beast when you are among the market leaders… we take it as a confirmation of a leadership position.

When we do confront our detractors on their mischaracterizations, such as “solution selling is dead” or “that methodology is old” or “it’s just an approach where you ask 20 questions and hope you find a problem you can address” they usually come back with the same response… “We didn’t mean your trademarked methodology; we meant the general concept of solution selling.”

We also have to weather the trendy selling phrases that pop up… “Provocative selling”… “Sales challenger”… “Outcome based selling”… (Insert your own trendy phrase here). The irony is that while all of those are relevant approaches, they’ve been approaches inherent in Solution Selling® for years.

Provoke the prospect? – Solution Selling® includes methods, concepts and tools designed to stimulate interest and curiosity by leading with compelling, pain-oriented messages that provoke the prospect from a state of latency to exploration. These targeted, relevant messages focus on problems solved, value attained, and results measured. In this case, the seller or marketer is leading with a message that would rouse interest from their target prospect.

Sales challenger? - Solution Selling® promotes effective, sales conversations that methodically align conversations to where the buyer is in their buying evaluation. And then, consultatively and tactfully challenges the buyer’s current perspective when a more effective solution may exist. To effectively challenge a prospect, a sales professional must have situational fluency around their capabilities and competitive capabilities, the prospect’s market and the issues in which they are faced – all traits of a true Solution Seller.

Outcome based selling? – Solution Selling® defines “pain” not only as a problem or critical business issue that the buyer may have but also as a potential missed opportunity. If there is a potential missed opportunity, you will want to highlight the potential outcome of addressing that missed opportunity.  So while a prospect may not be missing their revenue targets, they may not be operating as effectively as they could be and therefore not maximizing revenues.  In this case, the seller is focusing the conversation/exploration on a potential outcome that would be desirable for the prospect.

While we have trained over a million people worldwide on Solution Selling® and our own pipeline of prospects has grown at a record-breaking rate over the last year, this isn’t a blog about how good we are but rather a commentary on the continued relevance of Solution Selling®.

At the end of the day, a “solution” is an answer to a problem. As a solution selling professional, you should seek to uncover or understand the problem of a customer and then consultatively, explore potential capabilities that can address the problem.

With that being said, as long as there are customer problems, Solution Selling® will be alive and well, until then, rumors of Solution Selling’s demise have greatly been exaggerated.

Solution Selling® stands tall against our retractors. Read more about our competitive differentiators.

What’s YOUR “Strength of Sale?”

In a recent conversation with a sales executive at a global firm, he commented, “our biggest problem in sales is understanding, realistically, what the status of our sales opportunities actually are. The word realistically is hardly understated or anecdotal – annual research conducted by CSO Insights reveals that only about 50% of forecasted opportunities actually close and almost half of salespeople (46.2%) need improvement in qualifying opportunities.
  
Do you know What YOUR Strength of Sale is?In essence, sales organizations are not very good at objectively assessing the probabilities of winning sales opportunities. By default, they spend more that 50% of their precious selling time on opportunities that are lost to competition or to “no decision.” There’s also a subtle, deeper problem with this issue. What the research is really telling us is that sales organizations are not applying process and structure to selling on a consistent basis, so they have no real way to understand where sales “quality” problems exist, and how to address them. The situation is analogous to the old marketing joke, “We waste 50% of our budget on advertising - we’re just not sure what half.”
 
Part of the problem is that the traditional BANT (budget, authority, need, timeframe) model for assessing sales opportunities is often inadequate for qualification purposes. To that end, we’ve developed a free mobile learning module for smartphones called The Successful Sales Formula™.

The Successful Sales Formula™, a mobile learning module (Solution Selling mlearning) provides an introduction to a more structured approach to realistically qualify your sales opportunities. While this mobile lesson is a simplified version of what is taught in our formal training programs, it provides the starting point for something we call “Strength of Sale” - a  more objective framework for understanding the overall quality of an opportunity. In addition, following this model also encourages proven best practices for navigating and winning sales opportunities (or exiting opportunities that are a waste of time and effort). 

To access the free learning module, sales people can register on their smart phones at www.spisales.com/mobile under the Mobile Learning section. Following registration (or login if you are already registered), you can immediately begin the lesson, and return as often as needed to revisit key concepts. After taking the mobile learning course, you can apply the concepts using a simple “Strength of Sale™” application (Flash-based app usable on your PC or laptop). From your PC, click here to access >>>

This is just the beginning. In early 2012, we’ll be introducing innovative, easy-to-use software and tools that will allow almost any sales organization to learn and apply best practices for selling on a daily basis. In the interim, have fun with the free application - share and compare YOUR Strength of Sale™ with others in the sales community.

Exploring Impact and Growing the Sale

I was recently in a meeting with a company President, Vice President of Sales, and a Sales Operations manager. When we began the conversation, I wanted to learn more about the sales challenges they were trying to overcome. I quickly learned that each person recognized the same challenge for their organization, but believed that there were very different reasons for the problem!

I was fortunate that all key decision makers were all available for this discussion, but what if they weren’t all there? What if I was going to provide a recommendation based on only one or two individuals’ input?

I would have been missing critical feedback on what this company needed to solve their problems. Chances are that my companies solution would not meet their collective vision as a company and might impact my ability to continue the dialogue with the client. What measures can we take to avoid this critical misstep?

As sellers, we need to explore how a critical business issue flows through an organization. One person’s critical business issue can become the reason for someone else’s problem. This “pain” could be a problem, critical business issue, potential missed opportunity, or goal that anyone in the organization is trying to overcome. Taking a few minutes to explore impact with your clients can help them address multiple problems and help you grow the size of your opportunity.

Also, helping your clients realize that these pains can flow throughout their entire company will help you create a compelling business case around your capabilities. Just think, if your recommendation will help your client solve three problems and your competition only solves one, who will win the business? 

This Solution Selling® Blog article is also featured on EyeOnSales.com, Here.

For more material on Solution Selling® for SMB see Nick Maslanka’s other articles.

Do You Really Understand Your Customer's Problems?

I have the opportunity to speak with the sales leaders for a lot of small and medium-sized businesses. One common sales challenge I have been hearing a lot lately is that sales people are not having consultative dialogues with the customer. As a result, sales cycles become longer or win rates drop. Let me paint the picture.

If you are a seller—it’s happened to you.  If you are a sales manager—you see it all the time.  A seller is working on an opportunity with a new prospect and all signs indicate that they are going to buy.  Then after a long period of silence from the prospect, the seller is told that the purchase or initiative is going to be put on hold.  The salesperson can’t figure out what went wrong and instantly scrambles to put the deal back together (sometimes making things worse).  The sales manager is confused as to why business that was once forecasted in the pipeline has seemingly disappeared for no reason.

While the customer may give the seller several reasons on why they decided not to go forward, chances are that the seller never truly understood the factors that were impacting their buying decision in the first place!

Think about the last purchase you made where you felt you had a positive experience with the salesperson.  Did the sales person introduce themselves and immediately tell you what they thought you needed? Did they ask you questions to better understand your situation and accurately diagnose your needs?

Here is a good way to test yourself to see if you understand your customer’s real problems.  Think of a specific opportunity you are working on and name two or three challenges that your prospect wants your capabilities to help them resolve. In most cases, this is the easy part.

Now comes the hard part. Ask yourself, “What bad thing will continue to happen if they don’t do business with us?”  It could be that their revenue won’t grow, they will lose market share, miss a goal, etc. Obviously, it varies based on product or service.

But if you can’t answer the question, chances are your prospect can’t either.
The basic principle here is to diagnose before you prescribe.  When you can answer the question, “what bad thing will continue to happen if they don’t do business with us?” you are ready to provide your prospect with a recommended solution. Challenge yourself to answer that question for your clients. They will reward you with their business.

To learn more about SPI’s Small and Medium Business Solutions, click here