Brooke Green

Today’s Guest Blogger is my great friend Brooke Green, principal at Caskey Achievement Strategies.  Brooke is passionate about her work coaching sales teams and beloved by her clients. Thanks for joining us, Brooke!

I always find this time of year interesting. If you have any responsibility for revenue growth within your company, I’m sure you’ve been asked to create a sales plan for how you will make that happen. My experience is that most are searching for new revenue, inside new businesses. Why would you not concentrate on what’s already there? Your key accounts.

Often when I ask this question, the response is the same “Well, yeah, of course I’ll continue to work with my key accounts . . . .” Don’t they deserve to be more than an afterthought?

In our practice we teach a sales process that never stops. There will always be new problems to solve for your clients, new expertise for you to bring to the table, new relationships to develop. However, more often than not, once the initial hunt is over we forget that the process should continue. How do you remedy this?

Put your KEY ACCOUNTS on the top of your sales and business plan. Be strategic. Work on the business, not just in it. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Who within the business deserves to know me and utilize my expertise (that I don’t already know)?

2. Do I know where the business is going and how the problems that I solve will fit into the future?

3. Have I provided a platform for learning, brainstorming and feedback exchange on the work we are currently doing and the current state of the business?

4. Have I shared the future of my business, what our company is striving to do and how my key accounts can benefit?

5. What are the threats to the partnership? Am I ahead of them or woefully behind?

If you don’t have a sales strategy each year (or even quarter) for your KEY ACCOUNTS you are diminishing your value to them and leaving money on the table. I know that the hunt for new business is exciting. Don’t let your inclination to look for the new, give an opportunity for the existing to bite you in the rear end.

How do you keep your key clients top-of-mind? Please post a comment.

This was our all-time biggest blog traffic post, originally from June 2011.

Here are five key points to consider in preparation to make your initial call on a prospective customer.   No, they’re not about putting brochures in a folder or loading up the power point!

1. 1.Know the customer.  Some sales people call on prospective customers with little more than a “lead”—maybe only an address and a name scribbled on a post-it note.  But whale hunters do not call on a large prospect until they have a complete dossier prepared by a Scout, someone in sales support, marketing or administrative assistance who has been trained to conduct the essential research. Your dossier should include a complete description of the company and its history.  You need to know its major customers and competitors, key products and services, and its market position.  Record three years of data on revenue, gross margin, and operating margin.  Total assets and total debt help you create a snapshot of the company’s current position.What is the company’s current market strategy?  Are they gaining or losing market share?  Are they poised to introduce new products or services?  Are they B-to-B or B-to-C?  What kind of  budget have they had historically?  Who is or has been their incumbent provider?
2. Think like a buyer.  We tend to have a huge need to talk about US.  We blab about our services, our track record, our cool tools and metrics and stuff that we do.  And the more innovative, the more creative, the more bells and whistles we can present, the better we like it. Large account buyers, however, are not really looking for the best of all possible solutions.  They want a reasonable solution that will work.  They want a solution that will not cost them too much money or work or time or change or internal conflict.  They want to choose a provider that will not embarrass them or get them into trouble.  So they have a huge preference for big companies, with big brands, that are well known and comfortable.If you are a smaller company or a company unknown or little known to them, you need to learn to think from their point of view.  They are afraid of you.  Your job is to make them unafraid.  (For more on this topic, join our Pier9 library and read Think Like a Buyer.)They cannot hear your value proposition until they become less afraid of you.  So what can you do?
3. Ask great questions.  Instead of leading off with what you can do, lead off with rich, meaty questions about their circumstance.  I don’t mean just the ordinary questions to discover their “pain points.”  What are their aspirations?  What do they want or need to accomplish?  What obstacles are in their way?  How can you help them define and/or scope out their hopes in terms that make sense to them and to you? Great questions invite your prospect to talk about how things have gone in the past.  How things are going now.  What is the typical way his or her company responds to the current set of needs, challenges, or aspirations?  How have they handled this need previously?  What has gone well and what didn’t work previously? Of course your questions are about the company.  However, your challenge is to frame those questions in the context of the individual or team that you are currently talking to.  Make it personal; keep it personal.
4. Listen.  When you ask great questions, you will typically get very useful answers.  If you don’t get good answers, or if the person you’re talking to doesn’t really want to interact with you and your questions, it’s a good sign to walk away from this deal at this time.  So the first point of listening is to listen for signs that you do not want to pursue this relationship at this time. But when you have asked great questions and listened to your counterpart’s answers for 30 to 45 minutes, that person begins to believe you are wise and knowledgeable.  You have learned valuable insights about what the prospect needs, wants, and hopes to accomplish.  You may have told very little about your company’s capabilities.  Nevertheless, you have proven that you “understand” the needs and desires of the buyer.
5. Ask for a process commitment.  A key ingredient in large account selling is to get commitments from the prospect and test whether they can and will keep their commitments.  A very easy and significant commitment is the process map.  This is a simple exercise that you can conduct on a note pad or on their flip chart or white board.  Map out the steps in their buying process.  Find out who needs to be involved at each step and whether the person you’re talking with is willing to get the important people involved.  See if your contact knows the buying process and if their process is compatible with your sales process.

Follow these five steps and you will have more productive first meetings with large-scale prospects.  Then you will be armed with key understandings to share with your team to begin designing solutions.

We’re up to #9 on my list of The Top Ten Ways You Can Lose . . . Even When You’re the Best.

And the 9th way to lose is:  Your team is complacent.

You’ve been so good for so long that your team expects that it will always be business as usual. You’re not scanning the market, not tracking old and new competitors, not learning every day about what’s going on in the lives of your customers.

Many growing companies are actually making a market, not taking a share of an existing market.  The more innovative and unusual your service or product, the more you are focused on a niche, the fewer your competitors, the more likely it is that you will experience a short-term success that you can’t sustain.

If you have been successful in bringing a new product or service (or product/service mix) to market, sooner or later other prospective competitors are going to challenge your dominance.  You will have painfully created a market–first persuading customers that your service is a great idea and then persuading them to buy from you.  When you hit a critical mass of customers, you will undoubtedly attract competitors.

Where will they come from?  Some will be new companies mimicking your business model.  Others will be diversified companies observing an opportunity that they’d missed.  Still others will be companies that have been very good at producing something that’s no longer valued in the market, and they are looking for a new thing that they can be good at.

There are ways to combat this tendency.  Here are a few:

• Conduct a Brand Promise Audit.  [This one-hour recorded how-to webinar is available to registered members of the Pier9 Premium resource site].  Review the marketing messages of your company and those of your competitors.  Revise your promises as required.
• Talk with your customers–those that you sold and those that you lost.  Be certain you understand what it is that people value about you and what it is that turns them away.
• Engage your team in bringing ideas and information forward.  The more individual employees who are engaging in social media platforms and knowledge bases, the more current your knowledge will be about trends that may not have even reached the “trend” stage yet.  Encourage your team to look for potential threats as well as opportunities.

Whenever you hold the position of “the best” for a period of time, you become vulnerable to many kinds of attacks.  You can’t afford for your team to become complacent about your #1 position.

We’re up to reason #8 of the Ten Ways You Can Lose Even When You’re the Best!  And reason #8 is:  Your company is too modest.

This one is sooooo hard for me to understand. But yes, we have clients who think that promoting the background and talents of their team, or documenting a few of their wins, or identifying key brands in their customer portfolio is inappropriate bragging.

This flaw can raise its ugly head near the very end of the sales process, when the buyers are making their final selection. You may have put a terrific proposal in front of them, quite likely better than the proposal from your closest competitor.  But the competitor included bio details about company leadership and key team members, success stories from several prestigious customers, a few succinct testimonials, and unique experiences or background that set them apart.

You’ve heard me say that you shouldn’t lead with the “all about us” stories.  But before you close the sale, the buyers should know what sets you apart as a delivery team.  Even having these things on your website and LinkedIn profiles is helpful because the buyers are going to check it out again when they make their final call.

A couple of examples.  One client reports on their website that “the founding partners, combine more than eighty years of color separation and printing experience.”  Well, let’s have their names and their particular background experiences–there are three partners and each brings unique talent and background to a project.  Further, this company has produced catalogs for some of the most exciting brands in North America, but they don’t mention it.  True, some customers will not permit you to brag about them.  But others will approve certain kinds of publicity.  If you have great clients and don’t mention them, others will assume that you do not have name brand experience.

We talked with leaders of a company that provides security services for industry, hospitals, airports, etc.  Their website mentions that the founding partners have US military experience, but does not include that at least two of them were in Special Forces units. To me that background would set them apart as an elite security team whose leaders have mastered the highest levels of security practice–not just theory.

The key here is to be specific. Citing some details of your past accomplishments and those of specific team members, calling attention to key customers that you have served well, and including some honest testimonials is not bragging.  Rather, it is helping your prospective new customer to feel safe in hiring you.  There’s no need to spin the details or embellish them, just put them forward.  Don’t force the buyers to put your story together for you–spell it out.

I’ve been writing about 10 Ways You Can Lose . . . Even When You’re the Best. Here’s the seventh way: You are internally focused.

Some companies that are the best in their field are completely focused on sales and delivery plus R&D to develop new products and services. You may have the resources and the market share to sustain that approach, but you may be missing out on market feedback, which over time diminishes the strength of your message to the market. Your new products and services are invented inside, not in concert with your customers.

I have also worked with a number of teams who believe that no one in their field delivers the level of product and service that they do.  However, they have no evidence to support this claim.  When teams like this lose business,  they blame it on “politics” or “incumbents” or “price cutting,” but the truth is they don’t have any idea why they are losing.  They do not interact with their market enough to have a pulse on what’s changing.

Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel, wrote a terrific book (published in 1999) called Only the Paranoid Survive.  It’s about the need for relentless pursuit of market information and preparation for unforeseen market disasters.  And Jim Collins and Morten Hansen’s newest book Great By Choice (published October 2011) looks at ten successful companies and their leaders who managed to greatly outpace their competition in chaotic and unpredictable markets.  “Paranoia” was a key ingredient in their success–hard-nosed, direct confrontation of all of the possible ways that things could go wrong.  The bottom line is that things will go wrong; things going wrong is a normal state.

So, do you have a deliberate paranoia mindset?  Do you encourage all of the bad news and weird news to come to your attention promptly?  Do you refuse to blame a messenger?  The more you are outwardly focused, the better you will understand how to be the best and convey to your prospective customers that you are the best company to meet their needs.

We’re at reason #5 of Ten Reasons You Lose . . . Even When You’re the Best.  Today’s reason:

Your message is “overkill.”

When you are the best, and you know it, there’s a great temptation to document all the ways and all the reasons for which you are the best. That kind of message can backfire because it’s too hard to follow, too hard to understand, and especially too hard for your buyers to explain to their bosses.

What’s so hard to believe, and so painful to many companies, is that buyers in large organizations are not necessarily looking for the best, the most innovative, the most cost effective, or the most creative solution.  They are looking for a safe solution that will work–”safe” defined as they will not be in big trouble if it doesn’t work as well as it could or should.

So being “the best” could sometimes be defined as promising more than they can stand.  It comes in another version too.  That is the “too good to be true” version.  I worked with a global software and consulting company that specializes in spend management.  The sales team lamented that they were losing their best deals–those where they could provide the greatest savings for their prospective customers.  But in fact what they promised was so outstanding that the buyers didn’t believe it.  They had to learn to keep the promises more reasonable from the customer’s perspective, and then let them be delighted when they achieved even grater savings.

Keep your solution simple and your story simpler, and you’ll refrain from overkill.

Reason #4 on my list of Ten Ways You Can Lose . . . Even if You Are the Best is:  Your message is stale.

Maybe you are the leading authority in your market space. Over time, it’s possible that your message to market has become wordy or pompous or old-fashioned. You run the risk that an inferior upstart will capture a new tagline or a new promise and appeal to your market.

A message gets wordy when you try to capture all the history of your product/service.  It gets pompous when you use a lot of big words to prove you’re the best.  And it gets old-fashioned when the market needs or interests or even buzz-words have changed and you’re not keeping up with the dialog.

The recent Old Spice campaign is a great example of rebranding a stale message.  This is a product that’s been around since about 1934, purchased by Proctor and Gamble in 1990.  It’s a totally fresh approach, linking “how you look” to “how you smell” and particularly appealing to women to buy the product for the man in their life.  The products are now called “man fresheners”  rather than “deodorants” or “after shave.”

With well-known sexy (and funny) spokesmen they introduced a campaign to interact directly with customers on the air in 2010.  Their August 2011 YouTube video has had almost 2 million views in less than 60 days and the Old Spice YouTube channel records more than 28 million with 289,000 subscribers. They’ve kept the connection with seafaring but the captains are much younger and sexier than in the past.  One of the products is now named “Old Spice Swagger.”  The campaign “I’m on a Horse” was one of the most viral campaigns in ad agency history.

It’s not only the message that was stale; so was the advertising approach.  The social media approach to the new Old Spice appeals to a much broader and younger audience and is an integral part of the new message.

So if they can take a stodgy old brand like Old Spice and remake it for today’s buyers, what could you do with your stale message?

Yesterday I wrote about one of the Ten Ways to Lose . . . Even When You’re the Best, claiming that you lose when your rules of engagement are too rigid.

Then what do you know I had a perfect example of how that works.  My husband went to Sears to buy a new gas grill.  A few weeks ago, he stopped into Sears to inquire about the grills.  The one he selected was a special order item.  The salesman told him they would have it shipped to the Sears store, and then they would need a few days to assemble it, and then they would deliver it (free) to our home.  But he said, “I’m not the expert, you’ll have to order it from (someone else at Sears).”

So yesterday husband returned to Sears.  He had a 10% off coupon plus a $40 gift certificate, and having shopped around, he knew that Sears had the best deal on this grill.  Until he went to order it.  The grill expert said, “It says here (online ordering system) we cannot have it shipped to our store.  It must be shipped to your home (unassembled).   And you will have to pay for shipping ($137).  And if we assemble it, we will have to send someone to your home, and we charge for that.”

Husband says, “That’s ridiculous.  I can buy this same grill from other places and get it assembled and then delivered.”  And she said sympathetically, “That’s what I think you should do.”

How many $1000+ sales can Sears afford to lose?  How many people are willing to go to Lowe’s and wind up paying more (no coupon; no discount code) for the convenience?

Lots of us.  Your customers are like that, too.  Do you have a “rigid rules” example? I’d love to hear it.

Remember The Pretenders’ song “Brass in Pocket (I’m Special)?” [Go ahead--watch it! But come back, OK?]

There’s a sales lesson in those lyrics.

Yesterday I posted on Ten Ways to Lose . . . Even When You’re the Best.  And the first way is when your service is too specialized.

“I’m special.”  “There’s no one like me.”

If you are the only company that does what you do, you have a serious problem.  You don’t have a market.  It is not generally a good circumstance to have no competitors.  In fact, it means you have create a market before you can even sell into that market.

“I’m gonna make you, make you, make you notice.”

How are you going to get noticed?  It takes a lot of work  with a new service that people aren’t thinking about.  There are lots of business services that we know we need–accounting, legal, telecommunications, insurance, office equipment, and on and on.  But what about services that come out of the blue?  One that comes to mind is “spend management,” pioneered by our client Ariba.   It’s big business now but was almost unheard of as a business service even ten years ago.

“Gotta have some of your attention, give it to me.”

How do you get in the door?  Who is your lead buyer?  Is anyone looking for what you are selling?  Who will pay attention? These are critical questions for the highly specialized company.  Your cost of sale is extremely high, your sales cycle is long, and your close rate is abysmal.

What can you do?  Companies that have successfully brought an entirely new service to market have effectively invented their new market.  Here are some strategies to consider:

• Aggressive thought leadership.  You’ll need to leverage all of your intellectual assets–especially those of your employees–to educate your potential customers.  White papers, newsletters, an informative blog, webinars (live and recorded) case studies of early adopters–all will be important to bring your concept to the attention of the new market that you are creating.
• Superior content strategy. Not only will you need to develop rich content to educate your buyers, you’ll need to get it out in public systematically and through multiple channels.  Make a plan for how to balance the social media sites with the sites you own (your website, your blog, your opt-in newsletter list).  What is the content you will post, what will you push, what will you pull, and how will you encourage your audience to react?  Don’t forget the live events either–executive briefings (ideally held at your location if it’s nice enough).
• Marketing/Sales Integration.  Far too many companies have a black hole between marketing and sales functions. But you simply can’t afford it.  What the sales team learns in conversations with prospects needs to be fed back into marketing, and both teams need to be on board with strategy and tactics.  You can’t market an unknown service with brochures.  You need dramatic, exuberant, visible tactics!

Have you ever been too special?  What did you do about it?

Image courtesy P5 Blog p5.blogspot.com

Today’s guest post comes from Bill Caskey, founder of Caskey Training in Indianapolis.  (thanks Bill!) I’ll remind you that Bill is my guest for this week’s Expert Series call–Wednesday, October 19, at 9 am Pacific time–12 noon Eastern.  You won’t want to miss this one about how to turn small inputs into big outputs–improve your sales with minimal effort.  As always, this is a free call.  Register here!

Since we’re going to be talking about SUPER LEVERAGE in our call this week, I thought I would tell you a quick story.

Recently, I was asked to go to Barbados and spent a few days with a time-share sales team. “Whoa!” I can hear you squirming.  “Why would you spend time with that group…time share? Come on. You can do better than that!”

Well, not so quick.

You must not have heard me. I said BARBADOS! It was lovely and they were great. The  interesting thing was the property owner committed to himself early-on that he was not going to SELL the way other time-shares sold. He hasn’t. And he has prospered. Greatly.

But even though he never hires other time-share sellers (he prefers to hire good communicators and good character), there still is a tendency to “back-slide” into the vulture strategy (that most time-share companies seem to teach).

What They Miss

Think about it. A potential prospect walks into a time-share sales office and what typically happens? The amateur seller pounces on them and takes them through that manipulative, secret, coercive sales process. Until finally the buyer escapes—vying never to be hooked into that again.

But They Didn’t Need To Do All Of That

It just doesn’t have to be like that. One piece of counsel I gave to my client last week was “Let them tell you why they’re there.”  Relax. Don’t pounce. Just sit back and have a human-to-human conversation about their goals, their dreams, their preferences and what brought them into the office. Use the momentum of ‘coming into the office’ to your advantage.

Let them buy.

Stop getting ‘up in their stuff trying’ to sell them. Yes, you will have to inform them of the advantages. Yes, you may have to take them through some process. And yes, you will be asking them to make a decision. But no, you do not have to manipulate and coerce.

So what’s the lesson? The asset is a customer walks into your office. How much more of an asset do you want? So don’t blow it by getting in the way. Leverage that asset by being a human being with them. Be present. Give them freedom. Don’t take it away.

In our call, we’ll talk about a host of other mistakes sales organizations make in their effort to pursue business…and some ideas on SUPER LEVERAGE ideas.

This post was originally published at BlogWorld

Many large companies have rigid policies prohibiting employees from any business-related social media activity. If that’s your practice, I recommend you reconsider.

The Whale Hunters business is helping  B2B companies accelerate their growth by selling bigger deals to bigger customers. Most of our clients have some kind of a complex sale, such as a software solution, a technology, a marketing plan or a training program, for a few examples. When they are selling into a large company, they find that many people are involved in the decision of what to buy and from whom or whether to buy or do it themselves in house.

One or two people will make the final decision but many more will influence that decision. Whoever ultimately decides will not choose a solution or a service provider that is not widely accepted among other internal influencers. The price of change is too high; the price of internal conflict is too painful.

The other influencers will make their recommendation based on their confidence in the capability and likeability of the people from your company with whom they would be interacting. So, they want to get to know these people. They want to check out the credentials of members of your project management team or your trainers or your customer service staff or your IT department or your graphic designers or whomever. They want to know their peers in your company.

Now here’s where social media comes in: they will look for your employees on LinkedIn and on Facebook and possibly on Twitter or JigSaw and they will check to see which employees contribute to your company’s blog or Facebook page or LinkedIn discussions. They will want to see a profile, work history, where people went to school, what kind of credentials they have. Especially on LinkedIn, they will explore whether your employees have received recommendations from past or current customers, supervisors, or co-workers. They will be interested to learn whether your employees are thought leaders; for example, do they comment on relevant industry blog posts, do they ask and/or answer questions on LinkedIn, and do they participate in special interest groups online. They’ll look to see how your employees are connected, to them and to others. They may ask to connect with members of your team.

If your employees are invisible online, or if their only presence is a personal presence, you will be at a distinct disadvantage in comparison to other competitors whose employees are visible and active online.

Of course you need policies and procedures, mostly guided by common sense. If you have a marketing team, someone there can draft policies and provide some training. If you’re smaller than that, find a blogger or a savvy GenY employee to take a lead. To start in a small, safe way, encourage your employees to create a LinkedIn profile. Teach them what a good one looks like, and help them get a professional headshot photo. Ask them to request recommendations. Show them how LinkedIn works, how to find groups, and how to participate appropriately. Make your expectations clear, and be explicit about how much time during business hours would be acceptable for professional social media activity. Even a limit of 10 minutes a day on LinkedIn will enable them to become well-connected (and LinkedIn won’t require a daily check-in).

The more your team “connects” with others, the more powerful your company will become in business development opportunities-more sales, bigger deals.

There’s a very funny commercial on these days about a woman calling the help line for her bank and reaching an overseas guy who calls himself Peggy.  There are a couple of permutations, but it’s all the same point.  Can you get the service you need?

I’ve had some occasions in the last couple of weeks to deal with the cable company customer service, resulting in new lessons learned.  And this isn’t a rant about Cox Cable; it’s a set of observations about customer service.

The first cable employee came to our house to install the service–cable, cable modem, and phone service.  He spent about 2 hours there and got us set up with both wired and wireless service.  Put the cable modem and router inside the wall panel and replaced the cover.  All looks well.  He leaves us with his cell number and the number of his dispatcher, should we have any trouble.

Well, we had trouble the first night (unfortunately Friday night) when the cable TV went out.  I called out installer guy but he could not come until morning.  So I called customer service, and they tried to get us reset remotely, but could not accomplish it.  However, the next morning the cable was working again, so we assumed it had been fixed and told the installer we did not need him.

Meantime, the cable went out a couple more times over the weekend but still came back on.  So we learned that we need a new box–the one we have is probably not a good one.

On Saturday, husband wanted to watch the Illinois football game, scheduled to be on the Big Ten channel (even in Phoenix).  Could not find that game.  Called cable company, and the service rep said they don’t offer the Big Ten “overflow” channels–have never had them.  Although we had just bought that service and had a channel guide in front of us with those channels listed–they just didn’t show up where they were supposed to.  Eventually, the service rep found the channel and directed us to it.  But he said, I’ve worked here three years and we’ve never had those channels.  And we’d never be showing a midwest game out here!  So much for his subject matter knowledge.  Big gap between sales (who promised those channels) and service (who can’t find them and doesn’t even know they’re there). P.S.  How often have we written about that gap here?

On Sunday, very early in the morning, the internet goes out–cable TV working, Internet not.  Called customer service; this person was not knowledgeable, tried to reset but couldn’t, and told me we’d need to have a technician on Monday.  I called again later, and talked to a much better prepared service rep, who finally diagnosed that the router was bad.  I was able to install a new router, and my Internet connection was restored.  But when I had had to turn the modem on and off, remove the battery etc., I discovered that the installer had not mounted the equipment inside the box but left it hanging by the cables.  The main modem connection was already dangerously loose!  And along the way, none of the wireless worked any more.  After I wasted a ridiculous amount of time trying to reset everything, we called Data Doctors and had a very well-prepared technician come to the house and put everything back together.

My point about all of these experiences is that even with the best of intentions and a few seemingly very capable people, the cable company left us with a combination of hardware and software problems, which cost us a lot of time and eventually some additional money because we went elsewhere for a solution.  And we still need a new cable model and a new Internet modem.

Companies that really provide outstanding service pay much closer attention to training and to processes.  If you’re going to install the modem and the router on a wall, the process rule should be “you have to mount it.”  These companies make sure that every customer service representative knows all of the channels and knows not to argue about what the customer’s brand-new channel guide says!  And they make sure they everyone knows how to make the fix remotely–not just some of them.

I’m quite certain that is expensive training.  It takes a lot of time and a certain amount of experience, which is best acquired with a mentor.  Cable companies are in the top 10 of companies rated for worst customer service.  That’s in part because consumers have so few choices in any market.  But eventually cable companies will go the way of many other services that have been dis-intermediated, and consumers will get what we want.

So don’t be chintzy on your customer service training; it’s really your brand in the eyes of your customers.

I’m up to reason #5 today of the 10 Ways to Lose . . . Even When You’re the Best.  Let’s start with a reminder of what this is all about.  Every day I talk to clients who say some version of this:  “I don’t understand.  We clearly had the best proposal, at a great price.  Why did they go with someone else?”

It’s so important to understand how and why this happens.  It comes down to fear on the buyers’ part.  They would rather make a more conventional choice that is “good enough” than go out on a limb for a truly superior choice.  Happens every day!  And you, as the seller, contribute in a number of ways to their fear.

Here is reason #5 that you lose:  Your message is “overkill.”

When you are the best, and you know it, there’s a great temptation to document all the ways and all the reasons for which you are the best. That kind of message can backfire because it’s too hard to follow, too hard to understand, and especially too hard for your buyers to explain to their bosses.

You’ve failed to give them a clear and simple message of the value as expressed, including an analysis cost versus price.  If you spend much time talking about your benefits and advantages, they will think that you don’t understand them or even don’t care about them and their concerns.  And your champions will be at a loss for what to take upline.

You need to spend much more time listening to them and what they need rather than telling them what you can offer.  All of your marketing slicks, brochures, detailed website and related materials can backfire if you don’t zero in on the two or three salient points that will make a difference to most buyers and especially the one that you’re talking to now.

The overkill problem is most evident when there is a big gap between sales and marketing.  The marketing team is focused on documenting all of your company’s many benefits, while the sales team is listening for feedback from the buyers–which is not focused on those benefits after the initial conversations.  Further, the buyers have already informed themselves about you and your services long before they talk to you, so they are ready to talk only about them.

A simple message, simply stated, repeated in a variety of ways to a variety of people, complete with subject matter experts telling the same story, and a few simple tools to help your buyers move the story forward, will move you several steps forward ahead of your competitors.

There’s a version of this called “too good to be true.”  I’ve worked with a global company that provides spend management services, and I learned from their sales team that they sometimes lose exactly the deals where they can demonstrate the biggest cost savings and the highest ROI.  The buyers simply don’t believe them.  It’s overkill.  Our colleague and friend Merlin U. Ward did a great guest video blog on the topic of “too good to be true–check it out.

Have you ever lost a deal through overkill?  We’d love to hear about it and how you overcame it next time.

Today’s post is a reminder that tomorrow–Tuesday, Sept. 27–I will interview Anthony Iannarino, author of The Sales Blog, about The Commodity Trap: How to Get Out and Stay Out.

If your products and services are not commodities, but your prospective customers are telling you that the lowest price is all that matters, Anthony thinks you are doing things wrong.  He’s the most articulate person I’ve ever heard on this topic of how to avoid becoming a commodity, full of wise, practical advice on specifically how to deal with the price issue.

For example, Anthony recently blogged about your dream client calling with the news that you are among their top three choices, and that they want you the most, but you’re priced higher than the other two.  They want you to discount your price.  Specifically, what should you do?  That’s the kind of situation we’ll be talking about tomorrow.

I hope you’ll join us!  Register here for call-in information.  There is no registration fee for this teleconference; long distance charges may apply.

We’ll be live at 9am Pacific (and Arizona); 10am Mountain; 11am Central; 12 noon Eastern.  The recording will be posted on The Whale Hunters Pier9 (Premium site) in our Expert Series archive and for a limited time will be available for Pier9 Basic members (basic membership is free–why not join today?)

Today’s guest post comes from Anthony Iannarino, President and Chief Sales Officer for SOLUTIONS Staffing, a best-in-class staffing firm, and the Director of B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy. He’s also the author of The Sales Blog

Companies spend time, effort, and money working to different their offerings from their many competitors. The more special their offering, the more value it creates, the greater its chances of being chosen by their clients. This differentiation also improves the margins the company earns by selling its offering and producing results.

Enter the salesperson. The deal in front of them is hot. They are competing against other firms, and they have used their company’s differentiation strategy to pull themselves out of the pack. But when all the numbers are entered into the spreadsheets, their offering isn’t the lowest price. In fact, it’s the highest of the three finalists.

Because the buyer really wants to buy from our not-so-fictional salesperson here, he
calls and says that he will sign the contract and give them the business if they can lower their price.

And this is the point at which the decision is made to commoditize the business.

It sounds like the decision is the buyer’s. He doesn’t value the differences in results that are created by paying more to obtain them. But it isn’t the buyer’s decision  to commoditize the business; it’s the seller’s.

The Slippery Slope

The slippery slope for salespeople and sales managers is allowing the business to be
commoditized and, over time, they allow the margins to be destroyed. In most
cases, the company’s ability to differentiate itself is predicated on having the margins necessary to produce a better result. Without the margins, the company not only loses the ability to differentiate—it often loses the ability to produce results.

Only later, after the lower price has been accepted and the work begins does the
lower price start to become problematic. The results promised aren’t produced, and the client isn’t satisfied. Then, based on the evidence, he says: “See? I knew I shouldn’t have paid more. You are all the same.”

This is why we don’t commoditize.

Protecting Pricing

To protect pricing, margins, and your ability to differentiate yourself and your offering, you have to resist becoming a commodity. Instead of accepting the business at the lower price, you have to make the case for the client paying a higher price (in all likelihood, the price they need to pay to get the result they really want).

It sounds something like this: “I understand that our price is higher than our competitors. That’s by design. I didn’t do a good job explaining how your greater investment is going to allow us to provide a far greater result and, ultimately, result in a lower cost. Can we get together and let me try to do better job explaining this and showing you how our price allows us to produce the results you need at a lower cost?”

The salesperson has the power to make a difference for both her client and her company here. She has the ability to resist being commoditized, and she has the ability to translate the price into value, shifting the decision from price to cost. By preventing the commoditization, she can protect the firm’s differentiation strategy and their ability to produce the results they sell.

Please join us!  I will interview Anthony on this topic (The Commodity Trap: How to Get Out and Stay Out) for The Whale Hunters Expert Series Call on Tuesday, September 27.  It’s a free call but you need to register here.

Your Opinion Doesn't Count

Today’s guest post is from Dave Cooke, Whale Hunters friend and partner. author of The Sales Cooke Blog, and co-author of the podcast “Don’t Sell Me Bro.”

Very few people welcome an unsolicited opinion.  They welcome them even less from someone they don’t know very well, if at all.  Pitching a product or service to someone with the attitude that “you know they need it” is just like an unsolicited opinion.  What gives you the right to tell me what I need when you know so very little about me?

This is the fatal mistake far too many salespeople make – assuming that everyone can use or benefit from their product.  Frankly, few business owners have the time to meet with people who know nothing about their business or with someone who believes they already have the answer. 

Believing in what you’re selling is great.  Having a high degree of confidence in where the product has been most successful or well received is wonderful.  Even having the experience or familiarity with the types of organizations that value your product can be beneficial.  However, there is one problem—like the unsolicited opinion, you have not earned the right to tell anyone what they need.  Until you spend some time learning, nobody cares what you think.

The fundamental flaw in the “I know what they need” sales approach is that the sales professional has made the mistake of looking at the sales arena through the wrong lenses — theirs.

Great sales professionals have the uncanny ability to see, recognize, and understand the world through their customers’ eyes.  In order to communicate with the customer as a trusted advisor—someone who has earned the right to offer advice to a challenge or issue – the sales professional must engage in the learning process first.  It is this learning process that provides valuable information, builds trust, establishes credibility, and facilitates the establishment of a professional rapport between client and salesperson.

When a salesperson walks in with the answers to a problem that has not been verified, discovered, discussed, or revealed, their ignorance and their arrogance is exposed.  When this occurs, there is no opportunity to recover and build a relationship.  There is only resistance to spending anytime with someone who comes in with answers without even knowing whether there was a question.

No matter how effective, wonderful, valuable, innovative, or amazing the product is, there is little to opportunity to amaze anyone with it until you have invested the time building the relationship by learning all that you do not know about your client’s business.  If your perspective is outbound on the customer, you need to change your viewpoint.  See and understand the world from the client’s perspective, internalize what they know, observe, and live everyday and you will have potentially earned the right to express your opinion; or, offer your advice.  If you have not earned the right, you are wasting everyone’s time.

Here are three things to consider before expressing your unsolicited opinion:

1. How much do you know about your prospect’s business?  By definition, “know” is specifically what they have shared directly with you about the issues, challenges, and opportunities in their organization.
2. Every single business owner has these fundamental drivers – make money, save money, solve a problem, fulfill a need.  How effectively can you directly link your product to something you “know” about their business that will help them accomplish one of these objectives?
   
3. How did the prospect or client solicit your thoughts or ideas on how to solve their problem?  This often happens when you have earned the right – when a business owner trusts you enough, they will often ask for your advice.  That is the open window to share how you and your product can help.

Stop “selling” and start “solving.”  Keep your opinions to yourself and starting learning all about the many things you don’t know.  When you are done listening and learning, ask yourself – did they ask for my opinion?  If they didn’t, you haven’t earned the right, yet.  Keep working at it.

Today’s contribution to Fatal Sales Failures comes from Barbara Hauser, The Whale Hunters Certified Partner in Weston, Florida and president of Barbara Hauser Associates.

As I work with accomplished sales teams and their managers around the world, I experience a common phenomenon that I see as a fatal mistake for their organizations.  I see it as the fault line in many sales cultures that runs from the top down – and it shows up like the monkeys who can see, hear and speak no evil – no offense intended.

When business is on an upward, growth curve the monkeys can’t see the things that might threaten progress.  The blindness often keeps the monkeys from seeing how misguided compensation systems create competition internally and drive a wedge between departments.  It also tends to hide unnecessary costs and overhead and sees competition as a nasty speck of dust on their computer screens.  After all, things are good!

The monkeys are also hard of hearing during these times.  They listen to the opinions they agree with and filter out what they don’t like.   In some cases, they are so focused on talking and delivering the business case, they don’t even slow down long enough to give the customer a chance to get a word in edgewise.   Customer complaints are just static in the background, especially towards month end, a “no” isn’t really a “no” with legitimate reasons that could guide our offers– it’s an excuse to discount deeply to show the customer that they can’t make a good decision without our help.

The monkey habit that I think makes this a fatal mistake is that while things are on a roll,
there’s a tendency not to speak up on issues that need to be resolved.  With an attitude of wanting “solutions, not problems,” much of the early intelligence that sellers pick up from the market never makes it as credible data and evidence onto management’s radar screen. Instead, sales strategy that pushes people to do more of the same and try harder to perform arises from the insane logic (which seems totally reasonable at the time) that sellers could produce more if they wanted to – they just don’t have the “buy-in” and “commitment” they need.

3 things that will help you avoid the monkey trap

 1)   Hire an outside coach or consultant to challenge you and your team’s perspectives.  Find out who your best competitors are in your industry and research what they’re doing differently.

2)  Put feet on the street to listen closely to current and past clients.  Use the net promoter score or similar tool to rate their willingness to refer you to others.  Keep your focus on creating an outstanding customer experience.

3)  Train your staff continuously.  One of the greatest fears any adult performer has is to admit that they don’t know how to do something.  Help people feel comfortable expressing their limitations by being a good role model.  Make learning a number one team priority.

Today’s post, #2 in the Fatal Sales Failures series, comes from Merlin U. Ward, founder and Principal of Drip Media and great friend of The Whale Hunters.  I think Merlin is very effective in using video blogs!

This post was originally published at BlogWorld on May 25th.

To be successful in B2B sales today AND tomorrow, you need to actively build your social media presence.  I assume since you are reading this blog that you already know that, or at least you are interested in knowing more.  But it frightens me how many small to midsize companies behave like ostriches when it comes to a serious evaluation of their social media strategy.

Here are five serious ways that you will be left behind:

1. Thought Leadership.  You are not actively engaged in developing a point of view about your industry on behalf of your company.  You and/or your employees are not publishing articles and white papers, or participating in online discussions, or asking and answering questions in the leading social media sites for your industry and/or your state and locale.  Therefore you will not become known as an industry leader and will increasingly be perceived as irrelevant.
2. Website.  It’s a marketing piece all about you.  It is not interactive, inviting visitors to participate in any way.  It doesn’t offer any links to unbiased information or free white papers or eBooks or any little way to promote extra value.  It just sits there, doing nothing for you.  Therefore, you are by definition losing ground to competitors who are upgrading their interactivity.
3. LinkedIn.  You have a minimal presence or none at all.  Only one or two of your employees are engaged here.  There is a lack of personal photos, complete profiles, and connections to other professionals.  You are not members of relevant industry groups.  If groups don’t exist, you haven’t taken leadership to create them and invite others.  Therefore, interested prospects will not find you, nor will you find them.
4. Google Alerts. You have not set “Google alerts” (they are free) to help you monitor what is being said about you personally, your company, your industry, and your key executives on the Internet.  You do not have any system to monitor the flow of industry information and where you may, or may not, fit into it.  Therefore you have no basis for an improved marketing strategy.
5. Opt-In e-mail List.  You are not actively building your list of friends, current customers, and prospects, so you have no reliable and inexpensive way to reach them with news, special offers, or simply thanks for their business.  Therefore you run the risk that your competitors have a much better list and the capacity to reach your customers and prospects regularly.

You may not need a Facebook page.  You may not need a Twitter account.  Those channels depend highly on the nature of your business and where your audience is engaging online.  But even if you think today that your market is offline, I challenge you to think again and to investigate or ask your youngest, newest employee to investigate on your behalf.

Today’s communication channels will change, as did the mail, telegraph, telephone, cell phone, etc.  They will continue to evolve.  But the basic premise that you need to be connected will not change. If you’re not sufficiently connected, the steps you take today will pay you back many times over!

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Here’s the new part of this post.  The Whale Hunters offers you many examples of how to put your social media presence into practice.

Web | Blog | Twitter | LinkedIn
The Whale Hunters LinkedIn Group

This month’s Expert Series guest is Anthony Iannarino, sales coach and writer of The Sales Blog.  I’ve been following Anthony on Twitter for quite awhile (@iannarino) and have always found his comments right on point.  I subscribed to the blog and was expecially intrigued by his many, many posts about “price” and “cost.”

A lot of The Whale Hunters client companies believe they are playing in a totally price-driven market.  They do not see any opportunities to compete other than on price.  When they lose a deal, they assume they lost it on price.

The problems with that zero-sum game are that there are always limits to how low the market can drive prices (before vendors abandon the market) and that every vendor is vulnerable to price-cutting by any competitor at any time.

So, when I read Anthony’s blog, I find really good insights and explanations as to how company management and sales people can take positive steps to avoid the Commodity Trap.  His insights are completely consistent with Whale Hunting philsophy–increase your confidence through research, preparation, and hard work–know your market, your customers, and your competitors–and constantly seek to add value.

I recommend you subscribe to The Sales Blog, and by all means reserve your space for the Expert Series call, Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 12 noon Eastern time (9 Pacific; 10 Mountain; 11 Central).

I mentioned earlier that my husband and I are buying a house.  Since we bought a new house with an unfinished back yard, we also went shopping for a swimming pool.

Now if you have followed the housing market at all, you may know that Arizona is still the second hardest-hit market in the country (behind Nevada)  as measured by existing homes that are “under water” on their mortgages.  To say that home sales over the past few years have been slow is a grave understatement.  So it’s got to be true that pool sales have been stagnant and that pool-building companies have been hurting for business.

We talked to four pool builders, each recommended by our builder or a friend.  We met with each of them before we read any online reviews so we could keep an open mind.  In each case we told them that we were comparison shopping for bids (which I’m sure a pool builder would expect given the size of the investment). 

Two of the four had invested in “Pool Studio” software, which enables the salesperson to design your pool digitally within the exact dimensions of your own back yard.  They had a great advantage in that within the day we had multiple views of a draft design and complete pricing information.  That was the first differentiator.  Second was how quickly they set an appointment for us to come back and willingness to work with us on design options.  We’ve never bought a pool before so we appreciated a lot of help from the salesperson.  Finally, there was a sense of trust communicated by everyone we met from the company that we actually chose.  It’s a second-generation family business operated by two brothers.  For our second appointment, the owners came out to greet us and chat.  They have invested in an immaculate showroom with two outdoor pools illustrating differences between and geometric and freeform pool design, so they can show you how things look “for real” as well as in the design.

Our salesman had already been to our house (we have not moved in yet) to inspect the yard and offer more suggestions.  He spent three more hours making improvements to the design without really raising the cost.  Before he would accept a down payment, he wanted to meet us at the house to show us how much space the pool would take up and make sure we were satisfied with our decision.  He told us which decisions could wait and which finishing touches could be delayed if necessary.  The walk-through (by the way on a weekend) led us to make a couple more changes, and we received new design pictures before Monday morning.

We are going to close on the house August 30th, and the company we chose intends to be ready to begin building our pool on September 1!

Once we made our decision (within a week from our first visit to a pool builder) we notifed the others that we had signed a contract and thanked them for their assistance.

We received one gracious follow-up note thanking us for the opportunity to be considered and wishing us well.  But we received two very inappropriate responses, as follows:

“I must say I’m disappointed because I really didn’t show you what we have to offer. I measured the property and gave you a tour of our facility. I guess I was not aware of your timeframe which is totally my fault for not asking. You obviously have your reasons as to why you made your decision before I could provide a design and price. I’m anxious to see who you’re building with so I will keep a close eye on the permit report.”

Aside from that being mildly threatening, this owner is clueless about how his competition is operating.  They asked our timeframe in the first interview and delivered accordingly.  Our salesman did not let any time lapse between meeting us and delivering us a draft pool design and a price.

The second surprising response was from a salesman who, on the day we visited, said it was too hot to be outdoors so invited us to explore the sample pools by ourselves, without any kind of guided tour!  When thanking him for his assistance, we said price was a differentiator.  Here’s the response we got:

“I know I was a day late in getting the pool price to you, but likewise I did design your pool and get it to you on the same day.  You had the opportunity to meet me so you know from my age that I am not a neophyte in the pool industry. In fact I have successfully sold over 35 million dollars in pool sales in the past 14 years, and never has anyone beat my price  for the same pool.   I will send you a $200.00 gift certificate that you can use or purchase of chemicals or other items of your choice if you will forward me a copy of the itemized breakdown for your pool.”

Once again it’s all about him and nothing about us.  No “thank you,” no “I appreciate the chance to bid,” just an insulting insinuation that we are too stupid to know what we are buying and an inappropriate request that we give him a competitor’s detailed pricing.  He went on to complain that we didn’t give him a chance to improve his bid, which is the same argument we got from a Honda salesman last year–after we bought a Toyota!

So, these sales people think there are no consequences for how they handle rejection of their offer.  But the internet is full of review sites–Yahoo reviews, Yelp, etc.–and like other buyers, we consulted those sites before we made our final decision.  Everyone can post reviews about companies we chose NOT to do business with as well.

I think how you handle yourself when you lose a sale is just as important as when you win.  A gracious, professional stance builds your reputation; a grudging whine confirms that we were right not to choose you.

How do you handle rejection in your sales process?

Just finished reading a great blog post by Paul McCord, “Your Call is Very Important to Us and Other Lies.”  I highly recommend it–very good advice.  The gist is that big companies may get away with lousy customer service because we’ve come to expect it, but small companies cannot.  Paul’s observations about customer service brought to mind a long list of unsatisfactory interactions I’ve had with companies lately–and unfortunately most of these have been small companies, local companies, owner-operated companies.

My husband and I are in the process of buying a house.  I won’t bore you with the nightmare of getting a mortgage these days–everyone expects the big banks to be a hassle.  But over the weekend, I was browsing the Internet for patio furniture.  After spending time on overstock.com and amazon.com, I decided I’d prefer to buy furniture from a local showroom so I could be sure of what I was getting.  I was interested in learning whether I could do that at comparable prices.

So I visited the website of a local store that specializes in patio furniture.  Immediately a customer service representative popped up inviting me to chat.  I didn’t want to chat yet, just look around, so I closed the chat window.  But another rep popped in, and another, and yet another.  By then it was getting to be annoying.

I decided on a line of furniture that interested me, but this website does not list any prices.  Rather, it has a phrase, “This vendor does not allow us to show our guaranteed lowest price.”  In order to get a price, you have to talk to customer service.  Usually I just leave a website like that, but I had spent a long time looking for the kind of furniture I had in mind.  So I opened a chat with one of the reps.  I asked one question:  “I’m interested in the XXX line of furniture, but I don’t have any idea if it fits my budget.  Can you give me a ballpark price on this particular chair?”  Now of course I have to start answering questions.

My name.  My email and phone number “in case we get disconnected.”  What am I shopping for?  When will I need the furniture?  Have I done business with them before?  Have I been in their store?   Then the kicker:  “One of our sales representatives will be calling you tomorrow.”  I typed back, “How about the price of that chair?”  She replied, “Would you like me to email it to you?”  Well, yes I would.  Then she responded,  “You will be hearing from one of our representatives.”

Before I could finish typing my angry response to this lousy chat, she closed it out!

Now like most people, I am willing to exchange some personal data in exchange for information or intellectual property.  I found this company’s expectations to be excessive, yet I responded to all their questions.  To do that and then not get the information I requested made me very angry!

My advice to them:  don’t feature live chat on your web site if you won’t allow the reps to communicate information.  And don’t make the live chat so intrusive that it’s like a smarmy salesman following you around while you’re trying to browse.  The sad thing is they probably don’t even know how often it backfires!

We’ve found that even when the price is *FREE* — like our monthly Expert Series call — customers expect a very high level of service.  Some of our callers want it to be a webinar instead of a teleconference.  Others don’t like one of the topics.  Sometimes customers didn’t get what they expected, even if their expectations were totally misaligned with our promotion.  My point is, every interaction with a customer or prospective customer is fragile and significant, even in a B2B environment like mine.  After all, the business buyer is a person, not a corporation.

Test out your own methods.  Ask people about their experience.  Take them seriously.  Do whatever you can to satisfy them or at least explain promptly and patiently why you can’t or won’t.

Do you have a customer experience #Fail to share?

How do you overcome this kind of failure in your company?

On day three of the #OverTen campaign, our topic was increasing sales.  Contributors talked about methods, about how to treat your existing customers, and about how to get noticed.

Do you want to increase your sales to over $10 million? Listen to ideas from Margie Traylor, CEO of Sitewire and The Whale Hunters (and also named by the SBA as 2010 business owner of the year for Arizona!)

Our friend Chris Conrey (author of the “Conrey is for Closers” blog and co-host of Don’t Sell Me Bro’ podcast) says:  How do you increase customers? Be good to the old ones.

My personal contribution to the campaign is about how to get noticed.

And to hear more all of the #OverTen contributors,  follow @GingerSell/overten on Twitter.

Have you checked out any of these video tips?  I’d love to hear what you think.

Yesterday we reported on Ginger Whitesell’s “OverTen” campaign aimed at encouraging small business owners–especially women–to set their sights on growing their companies to greater than $10 million in annual revenue.

Ginger has recruited some amazing business leaders to summarize their best advice in 30-60 second videos.

In case you missed them, here’s a recap of first five featured videos:

Why is small business growth important?  Holt Hackney (B2BBuzz) responds.

Indiana’s Lieutenant Governor Becky Skillman says government doesn’t produce wealth; entrepreneurs do.

Do you want annual business revenues of Over Ten million? ChadRoot (Spearhead Marketing) weighs in.

Patrick Quinlan, RivetSoftware CEO, discusses maintaining performance while you grow from 20 to 500 employees.

Halpin Companies CEO Katharine Halpin believes in motivating employees as you grow.

Thanks to all of the busy leaders who have taken time to produce these videos for Ginger and The Whale Hunters.  We appreciate your help, and we share your passion for small business growth and prosperity.

What do you think about the OverTen campaign?  We’d love your comments!  And stay tuned for new videos each day this week!