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

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. It’s that “Susie” closes her leads at “18%” and “Jimmy” closes his at “8%”.  Mentally, I see “n” number of Jimmy’s missed opportunities floating away in the smoke of burning money — WTF!

I live in a world of facts, specific metrics, blended averages and trends. Given that the laws of large numbers suggest reasonable equity in quality and distribution across all the Sales Reps, it is extraordinarily painful to realize the amount of money burned with the conversion rate delta from Jimmy to Susie. It’s painful enough when you have only 2 reps, but what if you had 1 Susie’s and 3 Jimmy’s or 5 Susie’s and 30 Jimmy’s?

Which begs the question – should Sales Reps sell via ART or SCIENCE?

In some organizations, 80% of the revenue is created by only 20% of the sales team. If you want to achieve the next level of scalability, I feel you need to master the SCIENCE in order to raise all the boats. And when I mean YOU, I mean Reps AND Managers AND Executives.

• Executives must budget for and recognize that giving their Managers the right tools will allow them to monitor, correct, leverage and be held accountable for the results.
• Managers must study the space they are selling in and put together a best practices selling process to use in the tools that all the Reps will follow.
• The Reps must use the tools and follow the process - even if flawed – so Managers can monitor the measuring points, view those metrics objectively and make changes to the process as needed to drive improvements across the entire sales team.

Think of it this way. What if you could leverage some of “Susie’s Art” and mass produce it as a Science.  True, you can’t convert 100% of it, but…

• What “Jimmy Sales Rep” out there wouldn’t want to drop the way he does it in exchange for the success Susie has?
• What Manager wouldn’t want to close the gap between Susie’s and Jimmy’s closing percentage to make his numbers better?

What Executive wouldn’t fork over the short money (Often the daily price of a cup of coffee for that same Rep) for the tools that would easily pay itself off by closing that gap alone?

By the way, did you notice the word – Process.  Right away this screams science.  It’s a documented, repeatable way to generally get the same results within the laws of large numbers.

Don’t have one? Are you afraid of the term? Don’t like being “boxed in by the man”?  Do you think you’re too small an organization to have one?

You want to scale? You want to succeed? Then “sales process”, “opportunity workflow”, “lead management”, or any similar term has to be part of your vocabulary.  Don’t let the term make you cringe. Any good sales manager wants his team to have the right sales best practices. It often starts with process.

If you have a sales process, do you monitor the results? Do you leverage the peaks? Do you remedy the valleys? It’s not just about where your wins come from, it’s about where do you lose deals. Where is one rep winning where the other reps are losing? How can you correct that? Is your best Sales Rep still running strong? Are your weaker Sales Reps getting stronger? Are you reaping the benefits?

Documented or not, I guarantee you have a sales process.  At Landslide CRM (insert shameless plug to our Interactive Demo that explains more), we come across, uncover and shape real sales processes and opportunity workflow all the time.  Don’t be afraid of process, leverage it.  Find empowerment and freedom through the structure. A successful CRM that provides that structure and process doesn’t have to be complicated to be powerful. And make sure you are collecting as much data as you can by leveraging the use of custom fields to your specific selling needs so you will have a factual, metrics based, picture of what’s going on in your organization. You can always go back and report on what you’ve collected later … but you can never make decisions on information you’ve never collected.

In the end:

• Jimmy will be closing a lot more like Susie.
• Managers will be able to help more Jimmy’s along and make their numbers.
• Executives will not only see a return on the monies invested, but also the time to put that “Science” in place.
• Your Lead Generation Team won’t be watching their budget go up in smoke.

Which do you prefer … Selling as an Art or a Science?

Special thanks to Jeffrey Cody for his contribution to the Solution Selling Blog.

Column Fodder

I know that I want a burrito, and I know who has the best burrito in my town, but for some reason, I still can’t resist using the clever iPhone app called Urbanspoon.  My favorite feature of this app is its highly additive ‘slot machine’.  You shake your iPhone and a little slot machine randomly suggests restaurants to try.  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.

Welcome to the world of column fodder – whether we are talking Mexican food or $1M software applications, if you aren’t first, then you have lot to live up to.  In the world of Solution Selling®, we call this an Active Opportunity (they are already working with another vendor, but feel that they need to do their due diligence) – you may or may not realize it, but this is very likely the majority of the deals in your pipeline.  You my friend are one of the other Mexican restaurants.

When you are responding to a pre-established list of requirements which have been defined by your competition, you are left with very low win odds.  Essentially, the company that worked with your prospect to define their requirements has developed a bond of joint discovery.  They showed your prospect their perfect burrito.  Although, if you are willing to roll up your sleeves, and use the principles of Solution Selling®, you can increase your odds of winning the business.

When qualifying opportunities and you are late to the party, you need to go beyond your ‘normal’ qualification criteria.  These traditional elements are typically constrained to things like budget (is the project funded), authority (is there a decision maker in place), need/fit (does you offering match their list of requirements), and time frame (have they identified one, and is it within a reasonable period).  There is nothing wrong with these components, which are commonly referred to as BANT.  But, if this is the only criteria that you use, then you are selling to prospects that have already made up their mind of who to buy from.

At this point, if you discover that the opportunity is in fact active, you may want to understand some additional criteria before throwing some time and resources to try to win the deal by reengineering the prospect’s vision of the perfect burrito.  In Solution Selling®, we call this an Opportunity Assessment; at the very least you will want to know the following:

Successful Sales formula™ - P_xP_xV_xV_xC

In other words-

• Pain – “is the customer likely to act?”
• Power – “are we aligned with the right people to win?”
• Vision - “does the customer prefer our offering?”
• Value – “does our offering provide mutual value?”
• Control – “can we control the buying process?”

You can further drill into each of these components in more detail as well, to fully vet out things such as have they identified their pain, are we talking with the people in power, etc.

Once you have vetted out this sort of detail, then you can determine your strategy for either pursuing the opportunity with the goal of convincing the prospect of your better/different take on burritos, or walking away. 

In today’s sales cultures (where most companies sales funnels are simply not large enough), many managers frown on sales reps qualifying out of opportunities, but if you don’t have a shot, learn to celebrate walking away. 

In conclusion, just because you did not define the requirements for your customer, you still have a shot to make them believe in the vision that you redefine with them.  Although, if this is not possible, make it ok to walk away; someone else is out there.  Find them.



Featured Event: Free SMB Webcast

Small and Mid-sized Business - Compete and Win with Solution Selling®

Small and mid-sized companies have to compete against large, multinational, enterprise companies every day. The loss of 1 deal can impact your entire organization. You can’t afford to lose, but in order to win, your sales team must have the knowledge, skills and tools to compete effectively in a global marketplace.

Webcast: Tuesday, June 14th at 2:00pm ET | REGISTER >>>

Join us as we explore:

• Key sales challenges for SMB sales organizations
• Critical importance of a common sales process and sales tools
• Key sales skills sellers need to be effective at selling solutions
• How we are helping other SMB organizations

Hosts Tim Sullivan, Amy Brasser and Nick Maslanka of Sales Performance International’s SMB team will discuss How your Small or Mid-sized Business can Compete and Win.

Learn more about our SMB Programs: SMB Programs

Click here for more information on this webcast

Register today for this free, one-hour webinar. REGISTER >>>

The Sales Training ROI Gap

The ROI GapIn our prior installment, Time for Sales Training to Grow Up, we discussed how companies over the past decade have struggled to achieve and sustain sales performance improvement – this while spending billions of dollars annually on sales training and improvement initiatives. As a sales training organization, we felt compelled to identify why companies aren’t attaining a higher return on their educational investments in sales. Interviews with multiple customers and experts, as well as industry research provided a number of insights. We identified five key contributors to the ROI dilemma:

1. Too Much Too Soon – The Sales Training “Event” - It is virtually impossible for sales professionals to learn, retain, and apply more than a small percentage of what is typically offered in intensive, multi-day training events – unless there is a systematic reinforcement approach across an extended period of time.
2. Training Not Aligned Around a Proven Sales Process - Training efforts focus exclusively on skills and techniques.  If there is no process “backbone” to attach new practices to, the new methods are applied sporadically and soon fall into disuse.
3. Fragmented Training Approaches - Many initiatives apply a partial or fragmented training approach that fails to provide an engaging, planned learning experience - across time.
4. Gaps in Curriculum for Specific Roles and Competencies - Even when there are attempts to define skills gaps with some level of rigor, some of the most critical competencies are often omitted from training initiatives.
5. Sales Management is Overwhelmed - In the high pressure environment of, “make your numbers this quarter,” most sales managers simply don’t have time to address the overall coaching and mentoring needs of their direct reports.

The illustration below is based on actual learning research that reveals the erosion of newly learned methodology content because of the factors cited above. As a result, most sales training dollars do not realize the expected return on investment. Research indicates that without systematic, ongoing learning and reinforcement, approximately 50% of the learning content is not retained within five weeks, much less applied. Within 90 days, 84% of what was initially learned is lost.

The ROI GapBut a continual learning approach, if well designed, can overcome many of the shortcomings of conventional training methods. So what can your organization do to combat the ROI gap and maximize the “return on training?” Next well we’ll take a closer look at what sales training research tells us about “best-in-class” practices, and begin to formulate a strategy for 2011 – and beyond.