People Don't Like To Be Sold---But They Do Like To Buy!

This is the quandary of the traditional sales person---they sell, but we all know people don't like to be sold! What we forget about this concept is that while people don't like to be sold, they really do like buying!

I'll say it again--people like to buy. People need to buy to achieve their goals. A problem is that people don't necessarily know how to buy! Solving this problem for customers is the real opportunity for sales professionals, it's the opportunity for sales to add value to the customer's buying process.

The role of the sales professional is to facilitate the customer's buying process. We can do this in many ways. Traditionally, a critical role of the sales person is to educate and inform the customer. Today's customers are much better informed---thanks to the Internet and all the resources available, but there is still a "last mile" challenge with many things so the role of educating and informing the customer is a critical function of the sales professional, the bar is just higher.

For the B2B sales professional there is a tremendous opportunity to create value for the customer by helping to facilitate their buying process. Think about it for a moment. As an example, how many times in a CIO's or CFO's career do they purchase and implement an ERP or Financial System? For most complex systems solutions, the buyers may only purchase a handful of times -- and each buying decision is separated (hopefully) by many years.

On the other hand, the sales person goes through this cycle many times a year. In the course of the year, sales people go through this process more times than most people go through in a lifetime, we are experts in the process. We know what organizations should be looking for in a solution, we know the errors organizations can make in selecting and implementing a solution. While our view is naturally biased, we can create great value in facilitating the customer's buying process.

How do we facilitate the customer's buying process? It's a few simple things, but that can have great meaning to the customer---again much is focused on educating and informing. Things like: What are the questions they should be asking---of you and of your competitors? What should their expectations of a solution be? Are they realistic, unrealistic? What are the pitfalls involved in selecting a solution? What are the things they should be considering, but not thinking about? How can they sell their management on the solution and providing budgets for it? The list can go on.

It's pretty easy once you start thinking about it. Just get out of your "sales" role and put yourself in the customer's shoes. If you were buying a solution, how would you go about it? What would you do? Share this with your customers and help guide them through the process as they execute it.

Another thing every sales professional can do is to make the process "easy" for the customer. Often, I meet with sales teams with convoluted, complex strategies to "sell" to the customer. We over think and over complicate the process--primarily because we are thinking about our competitors and not about our customers. If we just focus on making our solutions easy to buy, we will help our customers tremendously.

The role of the sales professional is to facilitate the customer's buying process. Customers love to buy, we just have to make it easy and productive for them to do this!

Creating Value---Business And Personal

I've been writing about creating differentiated value for your customers. Let me focus on a couple of elements of value---in this you will discover why "generic" value propositions miss the mark.

Value has many dimensions. As business and sales professionals, we tend to focus on the business elements of value--how much we can reduce costs, how much we can improve revenues, how much we can improve quality, and so forth. Business value, particularly when quantified is critical in sales.

There is another dimension of value that we often miss, but which can be the most important and differentiating element of your value proposition. It's personal value--what you bring to each customer you work with.

My friend, Charles Green, wrote a post on Two Questions. It's an outstanding post and part of it talks about personal value. He talks about asking the question: "How are you doing?"

Personal value is all about the individual, asking "How are you doing" helps you discover what your customer values and how you can help hat person. By exploring this aspect of value you learn about your customer's goals, dreams, and aspirations. You learn about their frustrations, problems and needs. You develop a relationship with the customer, showing that you are really interested and that you care about them---as individuals.

Elements of personal value can be very simple, but have a profound impact on your customer. It could be as simple as "get my boss off my back," "let me get home at a reasonable hour so I can spend more time with my family." It may be, "get me a promotion," or "get me a bonus." Until, you explore the personal side of value with each individual involved in the decision making process, you don't know how you can make a difference for each of them.

We talk about sales being about relationships, but without exploring the personal element of value, it is impossible to develop deep relationships with your customers.

Personal value is an important part of your value proposition. We have seen, many times, that the business aspects of our value proposition are roughly equal to those of the competition. From a business point of view, our value proposition is not differentiated. However, customers make the decision for us because of the personal element of the value proposition--they know we really care.

Before concluding, let me add a warning note. Developing and delivering personal value requires commitment on your part. It must be genuine, it must endure beyond the "deal." If you don't care, if you aren't committed to developing deep, genuine relationships with your customers, you are being manipulative. Customers will see through this quickly and you will never achieve your goals.

As you build your value proposition, think of your real differentiator--it is the deep relationships and trust you build with your customers. It is how you make a difference in their lives. This is the most sustainable and differentiated element of value anyone can create.

Features, Advantages, Benefits----Change Your Point Of View To Succeed!

The other day, Niall Devitt and I were having a conversation about the challenges of selling in the present economy. Ultimately, we determined that sales people need to change their perspectives--perhaps dramatically to be successful. Customers' problems have changed, decisionmaking has changed. Sales people must change their point of view to successfully meet these changes.

When I first was trained in selling, I learned an early form of solutions sell ling. I was taught to present FAB's--Features, Advantages, Benefits. It's still an approach sales people take today. We have our products, we present the FAB's in terms of addressing the customer's needs and requirements, hoping to present superior value to the customer. It's a model familiar to all sales people and one in which we have well trained our customers to understand.

Things have changed. Imagine, a customer--let's say she's a CIO and is looking for a new software solution. We're there, presenting our FAB's and she selects us--sounds familiar. The challenge is, that while this project is very important to our CIO, she has to sell or resell her management on allocating funds for this project---it was in the budget, but those budget dollars have a tendency to be cut.

As a sales professional, you've done your job. You've developed a great business case, with a compelling ROI and Payback. She takes that to the executive management team and guess what, they decide to invest their money in a project the manufacturing VP has presented, or they want to do a stock repurchase, or some other higher priority project takes those funds---we won the sale, we (and our CIO) didn't get the order.

Or imagine another case. The CIO's project is at the top of the management team's hit parade. They want to go forward, but they don't have the money--they can't pay for it.

Our job as sales professionals has changed, it is no longer sufficient (and hasn't been for a long time) to present our product FAB's and win. We have to take a broader view of things--we have to take a business point of view in determining our FAB's and presenting the FAB's of our business solution.

For example, our competition has changed. We no longer have to compete against our product competitors, we have do compete against using those funds for other things, other projects, or doing nothing at all. We have to look beyond our product, beyond our "decisionmaker" to the overall business. Today, I find, if a project isn't in the top 3 of the executive team's hit parade, there is great risk, regardless of the business analysis you have done for your decisionmaker, to getting the deal. As sales professionals, we have to look at the overall business, developing compelling FAB's not just for our product but how this project is compelling for the business as a whole---and we have to help our customers sell it!

Let's take another example. There are lots of customers who urgently want to buy your product, but they don't have the money to pay for your product. Any company that does not have some sort of alternatives---features---to their financing their offerings will be outsold by competitors that do. We need to have an expanded view of our offerings and the FAB's we associate with them. It's not just the FAB's for the product, but it may include financing offerings, different payment terms, or ideas that help the customer pay for the product they want to buy.

While we're on the topic, we need to look at the FAB's of our business solutions, not our products. Those FAB's may include financing offerings. They include the reputation and confidence customers have in our company. They include being easy to do business with, being customer service oriented and customer focused. They include our personal reputations, the relationships we form, and the trust our customers have in as as trusted advisers. They include the value we bring in presenting the FAB's for business solutions to their highest priority business problems.

If you are still presenting FAB's to your products --- and too much of our product materials focus only on this --- then you aren't positioning yourself to win. Change your point of view to align with the customer's and solve their problems.

Should Sales Professionals Be Certified?

First let's agree that many sales professionals (and others) are certifiable. My wife reminds me of this with every crazy idea I come up with. But that's not what I mean. I'm talking about whether there should be a certification process for sales professionals.

Over the past week, I've raised a lot of debate with my Posts On Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession:

• Part 1: Sales issues.
• Part 2: General business/organizational issues that
  impact sales effectiveness.
• Part 3: Recommendations for the future.

Over at The Customer Collective, Donal Daly of the TAS Group, suggested we look at developing a Sales Certification platform to start doing something about the level of professionalism in sales. He has been generous in offering TAS Group resources in developing something. Others, Christian Maurer, Niall Devitt, Neil Warren, Dave Stein, Paul McCord, and others have weighed in on the topic.

It may be time to look at sales certification and how we might improve our practice---if only to save ourselves from ourselves.

Many professions are required certification/licensing to practice their professions. Doctors, Pharmacists, Lawyers, Accountants, even certain categories of Engineers are required to pass rigorous studies, testing, and proof of experience in order to practice. These requirements for certification are mandated legally and have central "certifying" bodies that set the standards and administer the certification process.

There are other types of certification that act like "Good Housekeeping Seals Of Approval," and indicate some level of training and experience "certified" by a sponsoring organization. In the IT world, Microsoft and Cisco certified people are highly sought after.

Many other professions offer "certifications," though I, somewhat cynically, think they are more oriented to maintaining membership (while they do have certain knowledge and ethics requirements).

For example, there are "Certified Management Consultant" and "Certified Professional Speaker" certifications. I've actually considered both, but when I start talking to current and professional customers about it, their responses were: "Say what?????" or "Who are they to tell me whether you are any good or not?" of "Never heard of it, who cares!"

There are actually several organizations that offer some kind of sales certification, but I have to admit that I've never asked any of the thousands of sales people I work with every year whether they are certified.

Recently, after all the corporate scandals, there have been people in the government and august organizations like Harvard, proposing some types of certification for executives.

With all this as background, I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about "certification" --whether legally mandated or industry driven. I'm one who believes the tag line of an old joke "What do you call 200 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean.....A good start!" We've seen lots of "questionable" practices by lawyers, accountants, doctors and others. Sometimes it means you jumped a series of hurdles, but it doesn't necessarily make you any better as a professional, more trustworthy, or more ethical.

Others--like the Microsoft and Cisco certifications sometimes seem to have greater value in enhancing a resume and getting a job. There is a level of knowledge, but there are equally knowledgeable, sometimes better people who have not gotten the certification.

And, in my own case, no one has ever asked me whether I am a Certified Management Consultant or Professional Speaker---though a frustrated customer did call me certifiable (reconfirming my wife's claims).

I do think we need to raise the level of professionalism in the practice of selling. I hear this from everyone I talk to--both on the sales side and customer side. While I'm not certain certification is the answer, I don't have any better ideas.

Perhaps we can start another discussion. What do you think? I'd love your comments. Even better, I put up a quick survey to collect opinions and ideas. It will take you no more than 5 minutes to complete. The survey has two tracks: What do we as sales professionals think? What do our customers think? Go take the survey, encourage your peers to take it, ask your customers to take it. I'll report the results in a few weeks.

Here's the link for the survey: Should Sales Professionals Be Certified?

Thanks both for your comments and for participating in the survey!

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 3 of 3 – What Do We Do?

If you’ve made it this far through the series of articles, you probably want to quit your sales job and become a hermit in the mountains. I’ve certainly created a bleak picture. Thank you for your patience and dligence in hanging in with me!

However, I am tremendously excited about being a sales professional and for the future of sales professionals. I think the dismal picture I’ve portrayed, also provides an opportunity for real progress and growth for sales professionals.

Note---I’m focused on a small audience—people who are or who are committed to becoming the highest levels of performance in sales. I’m not talking about people that sell. I am neither naïve enough, ambitious enough, now willing to waste my time on changing sales. As with every function, there will be a tremendous number of “schlock” peddlers (call a New Yorker for translation). There will also be a large number of people who are in the middle---I see great hope for them, but led by inspired sales professionals.

I think the problems and challenges provide the opportunity for true professionals and those that aspire to be professionals to separate themselves from the rest of people who peddle.

How do we improve, how do we focus on becoming truly effective and high performers? Where does the leadership responsibility lie? I believe each of us can take ownership in driving change.

First, we can't be naive, a lot of the structural and systemic issues I identified in Part 2 can't be fixed --- will take more people working together (within and organization or across organizations. But, we don't have to let these constrain us, we can still get a lot accomplished and drive a lot of change that will improve our effectiveness --- as groups, teams, or individuals. We can't let these constraints become excuses for non performance.

To be honest---at least from an organizational point of view, I am tempted to point the finger at management—not just sales management, but corporate management. I do believe that poor leadership or no leadership is one of the key reasons sales (and organizations) perform at a far lower level than they could. I think leaders must set better personal examples, invest in getting things done through their people---which means coaching and developing them. I believe they must fight the systemic issues that block them from driving sustained performance improvement.

At the same time, only the top executives will be able to have any significant impact on the systemic issues. What does this mean for most of sales management? If I got my wish, I would hope that sales managers focus on three things: Doing their jobs as leader/coaches. There are coaching opportunities in every meeting—just the questions you ask have a tremendous impact your team.

Second, rather than reacting, changing priorities and strategies on a daily basis; stick to your principles, processes, and tools. Use them, presumably you implemented them because you believed in the results they could produce, give them a chance to work, monitor, adjust, modify. Follow through on them, diagnose what’s working and what’s not working. There are a lot of good processes, tools, and programs out there. Choose those that work best for you and use them. Don’t become victim of the program du hour mentality.

Finally, execute your processes and lead with passion and excitement. Inspire your people, your peers, your management to follow your example.

Individual contributors have a responsibility as well. Seek to become the best in your profession. Constantly learn, seek out the best professionals you can find, network with them, and learn from them. Develop your own processes, or internalize your company’s selling processes—adapting them for your use. The processes and tools work! They produce tremendous results, learn how to leverage those results for yourself. Invest in planning and thinking. It will get you to your end goal more effectively and efficiently then by reacting to your competition, customer demands, or your management. Set an example in your own performance for your peers.

Whether you are a leader or individual contributor, becoming disciplined and process focused, committing to follow through on these, exploiting the tools produce results. Leverage these processes and tools, not because your management tells you to, but because they help you become more effective.

I don’t believe change only comes from the top. I believe change comes from committed, passionate people at all levels of the organization.

Thanks for your patience in working your way through my diatribe. I have not hit all the issues, I think I may have a bit of a warped view on many issues. My greatest hope is not that you agree with my ideas, but that it stimulates a healthy discussion. Your discussion and comments will be better than my rambling posts! If I'm off base, please correct me.

In case you started at the end and want to go back to the beginning, here are the two previous posts.

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 1 of 3

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 2 of 3 -- Not Just A Sales Problem

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 2 of 3 -- Not Just A Sales Problem

In the first part of this post, I focused primarily on the sales function and challenges we have created for ourselves. However, what we face is not just a sales problem.

There are some things that keep us from being as effective as possible that are not just the “fault” of sales people, but which do contribute to our inability to sustain high levels of effective performance. Some of it is “business culture”—in general, some of it is “regional culture”---that is North American, European, Asian, and so forth. Some of it is “industry culture.”

These represent attitudes, behaviors, practices, expectations by all business professionals, but which applied to selling, adversely impact our performance and effectiveness. I can’t review all of these, but will highlight a few of the issues that impact sales effectiveness.

The focus on the short term is one of the biggest issues impacting organizations, in general, and sales specifically. CEO’s and Boards are concerned about today’s stock performance. Decisions are biased to what impacts our stock now—not what will increase our market cap in 2-5 years. If the strategies, tactics, and actions we have adopted don’t impact stock price today, then tomorrow we will change them.

This has a terrible impact on all parts of the organization, but perhaps the biggest on sales. Strategies, tactics and actions are oriented around booking the order today. If we aren’t tracking at or above plan, then we will change our strategies and tactics. We confuse the sales people, we confuse our customers, and we don’t produce results. We push our customers to meet our schedule for booking orders rather than their schedule of producing results. In this environment, the “program du jour” rules---at least for today, who knows about tomorrow?

Sales people become numb to this, they often ignore everything and just keep doing what they have been doing in the past. They keep their heads down and stay out of trouble.

Speed of execution is favored over planning. We are too busy doing activities, to focus on doing things right. We always have time to do things over (after all, our programs and priorities will change tomorrow, anyway). Taking the time to plan, takes away from time we can spend doing stuff—regardless of whether it moves us forward. We have studies, as do others, which show tremendous improvements in productivity, results, and effectiveness by investing time in planning. Clearly, we can’t go overboard, but there is a mentality/culture in most of the business world that favors activity and speed---any motion/activity is good motion/activity over doing the right thing at the right time with the right people.

We live in a disposable society: Rather than fixing something, repairing it, tuning it, we get rid of it, replacing it with something new. As consumers, when something breaks, we throw it out and replace it with something new. As business people, when something “breaks,” we throw it out and replace it with something new. When our people don’t perform to our expectations, we replace them with someone new. When our managers don’t accomplish what we want, we replace them with something new. When our CRM system, Sales 2.0 tools, sales training don’t produce what we want, we get something new. We don’t look coach or develop people for improvement, we don’t look at processes and analyze what is wrong, correcting that, we don’t learn from our problems and look at how we can repair, tune, or fix them---even though the path to good results by doing this is probably faster and cheaper than a replacement strategy. We deal with symptoms and don’t address root problems. Fixing the symptom doesn’t eliminate the problem.

We forget the Lone Ranger really didn’t exist. We look for the silver bullet, we believe in the magic solution—whether it is weight loss, or the 10 techniques to get anybody to buy anything. We are susceptible to fads and move from fad to fad. There are no silver bullets. Business and sales is hard work. It requires passion, creativity, discipline, follow through, and learning from our mistakes. There are no shortcuts.

All that counts is results. I’m all for results—they represent the ultimate scorecard. But results are produced from strong processes, disciplined execution, and focused action. Just demanding results without looking at the root issues that impact the ability to deliver results doesn’t produce sustained improvement.

Managers aren’t leading. In all functions, managers are spending more time administering than leading. Managers get things done through their people. Their responsibility is to remove barriers to their people’s performance, coach and develop people to perform at the highest levels, developing and managing the process. Unfortunately, few managers—from the CEO down do a consistent job at doing this. Many don’t know it’s their job, many don’t have the skills to do their job. Without leadership, without management setting the expectations and the example, how can we expect sales people to raise their standard of performance. As my colleague, Christian Maurer, likes to say, the fish rots from the head.

It’s better to look good than do good. We seem to honor image more than true accomplishment. What better example than the cult of personalities led by people like Paris Hilton who have contributed nothing. By contrast, a person like Greg Mortenson is relatively unknown, yet he has had a deep impact on dozens of communities and thousands of people. This translates into our business world. Executives spend more time cultivating their personal image/brand—often hiring personal media consultant, than letting their work speak for itself. A fantastic presentation or elevator pitch, a great PowerPoint is more recognized than a simple whiteboard discussion with a customer.

We are time poor. Nobody is “fat” in business these days. To be competitive and to survive, companies must be lean (remember lean is different depending on where you are). In a world of cutbacks and layoffs, the funds and number of people available to do the work have been reduced significantly. Too few people, too few dollars, and 7/24 availability --- thanks to our Blackberry’s, have given us no time to think, plan, organize. We can only react.

There have been too many breaches of Trust. All the items above, and others I haven’t suggested have created very low levels of trust---within the organization, and even lower levels of trust across different organization. We’ve heard and seen too much focus on your personal brand. We’ve seen too many commitments broken. We’ve seen too many of the top executives rewarded for destroying the organizations they were supposed to lead.

These are problems that pervade business. They are not just sales problems, we see these issues in virtually every part of every organization. They impact how we, as sales professionals, act within our organizations and with our customers. They impact how we are perceived by our own organizations and by our customers.

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 1 of 3 (in case you came in on the middle of the story)

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 3 of 3 – What Do We Do?

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 1 of 3

Let me start with an apology, I will probably gore everyone’s ox in this post. My intention is not to pick on any group of sales professionals, but to start a discussion about the state of the profession and to stimulate ideas on how each of use—as individuals, leaders, influencers might improve the practice of the profession. I’ve actually split this post into two, Part 1 addresses issues that are primarily driven by sales. Part 2 looks at systemic business issues, beyond sales, that impact how we perform. Part 3 focuses on what we can do about these issues, both as organizations and individuals.

I hope you take the time to read and comment on all three. I may just have gone off the deep end and be mumbling nonsense, I hope you correct me (I know you will ;-)

Over the past week, there have been a number of blog posts, comments, and discussions by people like Dave Stein, Niall Devitt, Christian Maurer, Paul McCord and others touching on various aspects of professional selling and why we as a profession are not improving our effectiveness.

Dave Stein lays the groundwork, with a lot of great data on sales training programs, books, blogs, and surveys on sales effectiveness in his post How Do You Fix Sales Ineffectiveness? If you haven’t read it, you should.

Billions of dollars/euros/yuan/yen are spent by companies in sales training, tools, conferences, seminars and other things to improve the effectiveness of their sales people. As both Dave and Paul point out in their posts, everyday some new book, blog, podcast or other offering promises the “silver bullet” to improving sales performance and effectiveness.

Yet, on the other hand, several months ago, one of my posts, Why Do Sales People Have Such A Bad Reputation, stirred up a huge amount of controversy and discussion with some people claiming there was little future for sales people, that customers buying processes were changing and the need or contribution of sales people was being minimized.

So where are we, what does this mean, where are we (sales professionals going), where does “fault” lie—if you want to lay blame. Some thoughts, observations:

Sales people have been the butt of jokes, complaints, and stories since through history. (I think this is a vicious conspiracy fostered by lawyers to take the heat off them.) We always will be, so why waste time on this?

The buzz words for professional sales today is “consultative,” “customer focused,” “solutions focused,” “value-based.” If only we became more consultative and customer focused, we would make the buying/selling experience more acceptable and make customer enthusiastic to see us. When I first started selling, in the late 70’s, the buzz words were “consultative,” “customer focused,”……. Nothing’s changed, so clearly we aren’t executing the practices that enable us to be customer focused.

It always intrigues me that we have continued to have this discussion about the importance of being consultative, but we have made no substantive progress in this area. It is not for lack of training programs, books, articles, testimonials. On the one hand, if we are selling and producing results without it, why bother? To those that claim this, I tend to claim you are underperforming your potential. You can sell more---more effectively, increase customer retention and grow your share of customer with consultative approaches---there is plenty of data to support this.

Consultative selling is difficult—it is disciplined, process based, and requires commitment and follow through on a sustained basis. Our focus on now (at all levels) makes this difficult. I think the issue about consultative selling is more about committed leadership than about skills development. Getting sales management to commit to integrating this into their day to day leadership style is the only way we will make substantive progress. Without this, we are wasting time and money.

Sales, by its nature, is about change. We are trying, for good or bad reasons, to get people and organizations to change. Most people are resistant to, or at least uncomfortable with change—they will tend to be resistant to the agents of change, as well. We have to live with this---maybe even revel in it. As a profession, I don’t think we talk about change management or change leadership enough. If I had to make recommendations for skills development, I would recommend something around leading change initiatives.

For too long, we have treated sales as a “black art.” We have let others wrap sales in a “mystique.” Part of this is the act of selling is usually done at a distance from the rest of the organization---it is done at our customers (Duuuuhh!). So people in the organization don’t see what we are doing. With other functions, you see people every day. You see the factories and talk to manufacturing people, you see materials going in one end and products coming out the back. It may or may not be a good process, but at least you can see something going on. You can say this about most other functions.

We as sales people have reinforced this, keeping people out of our accounts (or shepherding them in carefully orchestrated visits). We have also reinforced mystique by being less accountable for forecast accuracy and other things. “Just trust me, we’ll get a purchase order.”

Related to the previous point, we resist treating sales as a disciplined process. Recently, I have been involved in coaching a new Business Development VP. He did not have a sales background, but he was the best candidate for the job. He had a very rich and successful project management background. As you might expect, he was very concerned with his success in this role. I counseled him to think of sales as a specialized application of project management: You establish goals and objectives, you identify the critical activities to meet the goals, you set milestones and schedules to make sure you are making progress. Five months into his new role, he is well on the way to creating one of the most effective sales organizations I have encountered---all because he is applying the discipline, focus, and process orientation from his project management background to the sales organization. He has had to pick up some new terminology, some new skills (prospecting was his biggest worry, but he is doing fantastic).

While this is not new, I think we need to upgrade our thinking and skills around basic project management, process design/management, and systems thinking. All of what we do is a specialized application of those disciplines.

On a related point, much of what has been done and many of the tools in the quality movement, whether it is TQM, Six Sigma, Kaizen, or something else. These offer tremendous capability to improve performance and put discipline to what we execute.

Customers can be more informed and less knowledgeable: The internet, Web 2.0, Sales 2.0 provide the potential for customers/prospects to do much more research and to be both more knowledgeable on your products, competition and alternatives. At the same time, these tools have eliminated market entry barriers for everyone so there is a lot of crap available as well. Immediately, anybody posting a comment, writing a blog, sending a tweet, knowing how to spell www, becomes an authority.

The noise level---the stuff everyone has to sift through is skyrocketing. Will your customers take the time to sift through the pages of garbage and find good information from credible sources? Are we providing good information that is easy for the customers to find and absorb? The answer to both questions is probably not. This creates great opportunity and challenge to all sales people. The bar for performance is being raised by the sheer availability of information. The challenge to correct mis- or bad impressions is even greater. Sales people are going to have to be much more nimble in understanding and leveraging these tools, as well as making sure customers are truly, accurately, and well informed.

We have done too good a job in training our customers to have a low expectation of sales. Over the years, through our performance---pitching products rather than solving problems, focusing on the deal rather than producing value, getting the transaction done rather than building relationships---our customers have become conditioned to a lower level of buying behavior. I’ve been involved in situations where the customer just doesn’t have the time for a “value based” buying/selling process. Combine this conditioning, their natural wariness of sales people, and the fact they are time poor and pressured themselves, it creates great challenges in responding to the customer needs in a value added manner.

Let me stop here. In the next section addresses systemic business issues that overlay these issues, making the job of a sales professional even more difficult.

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 2 of 3 -- Not Just A Sales Problem

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 3 of 3 – What Do We Do?

Tips For Selling To Manufacturers

Thanks to the folks at TheCustomerCollective and Oracle for sponsoring a terrific eBook, Selling Through A Slump. It's a great resource for every sales professional. You really should download the eBook and use it as your playbook to help you in growing your sales within different market segments.

I was asked to write the section: Selling To Manufacturers. To tantalize you to read more in the eBook, I've published the tips I recommended below:

Selling to Manufacturers

Yes, we know the story, the manufacturing sector is had hit. Plants are closing, companies are looking to get rid of excess capacity, and no one seems to be buying. Yet manufacturers are our customers, how do we sell to them, how do we find ways of creating revenue in this sector.Let’s look at Dave’s Top 10 Tips For Selling Within The Manufacturing Sector. Actually, there are a couple of ways we can look at it---you may sell products, services, or solutions to help manufacturers design, develop, manufacture and support the products they develop. You may sell components, parts, or subassemblies that are embedded into the products the manufacturer builds. I’ll try to look at both aspects of this challenge:

1. If you normally turn right when walking in your customer’s front door, on your next visit turn left. Too often we call on the same old people all the time. Explore your customer, call on new people, new functions, new divisions. If you sold to the manufacturing/production lines, go to development/engineering, meet them and see if you can help them solve problems. If you normally dealt with a certain engineering group, call on the engineers one cubicle over, you may find new opportunities.

2. Look upstream and downstream in the process flow. If you supply products or services to support the manufacturing (or engineering design/development) processes, look at how you fit into the process. Can you extend your reach upstream or downstream to make the process more efficient and better integrated. If you supply component parts, look at the parts you connect to (Think the hip bone connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone connected to ……) Can you supply those components or even a subassembly? Can you increase your part count in each product?

3. Look at key/hot issues the industry faces and present how your products/services help the customer address those issues. For example, if you can help make peanut products safe, you are gold! Are there safety issues, environmental, regulatory, compliance issues your customer must address that you can solve? Can you help them with sustainability/energy issues?

4. Leverage plant consolidation and downsizing to your advantage---and to help the customer. In shutting down plants, they have to consolidate operations into fewer facilities. This creates a whole raft of nightmarish problems for the manufacturer. How do they handle the logistics? How do they make their lines more flexible? How do they transition products? How do they do better planning/forecasting for the combined workloads? How do they better manage productivity, quality and efficiency in a smaller number of plants that are doing more. This is a terrific opportunity if you can solve those problems.

5. Make sure they are using your products and services as efficiently and effectively as possible. Are they getting the most bang for the buck/euro/yuan? Audit the use of your products/services to see they are operating and top efficiency. Look at the parts you supply, can you suggest other parts that would be more effective/efficient? This is also a terrific opportunity to look at additional services you might provide (and charge for). It’s also a terrific opportunity to educate your customers about how get the most out of your products/services making them more knowledgeable, productive, and comfortable with your offerings. In the very least, when they start buying again, they will tend to buy what they know and trust.

6. Focus on supply chain efficiency, can you wring out costs in the supply chain/procurement processes? If you supply parts, can you take over more of the logistics management headaches? They probably have gotten very lean and supply chain management may be a big problem. If you supply equipment/systems/services sometimes common tools used by suppliers help dramatically reduce costs and improve efficiency through the whole value delivery chain.

7. Ask your best customers to introduce you to their most important suppliers. If you have created great value and efficiency for your customer, it only serves them to have suppliers that that are achieving the same value and efficiency in their operations---it can reduce your customer’s costs.

8. Look at what is happening to your customers’ customers. Can you identify things that are happening there that present opportunities for your customer to grow their business---which may drive demand for your offerings? Helping your customer grow their business is the surest way to grow yours.

9. Become best friends with the finance/controller functions in your customer. Make certain you understand how they evaluate investments. Make certain you understand ROI/Payback hurdles they apply in their analysis. Look at where they are trying to take cost out of operations or how they are trying to improve the financial position of the company. Make certain you are conversant in their language and lingo.

10. Focus on rich collaboration with your customer. Become an integrated part of their team. If you sell parts, become part of their engineering and design teams to help design better products, reducing their design time and costs. If you sell equipment/systems services, look at how you establish a deeper relationship with the customer.

I’m giving you 11 instead of 10 for two reasons: First, I always try to give my customers more than they ask for. Second, prime numbers have a certain elegance—so I had to end this list on a prime number.

11. Ask your customer how you can help and listen to what they say. Sometimes, that’s all the help they need, but no one ever paid attention.

I believe opportunities abound in the manufacturing segment. Those that take advantage and dig deep will find those opportunities and succeed!

There is a lot more good stuff in this eBook, download it now: Selling Through The Slump

What's It Take To Be A Major Account Rep?

The other day, a sales person I had coached a few years ago called me up. He was getting a big promotion to handle one of his company's largest customers. He called to ask me what it took to be an outstanding major accounts rep. The guy was already a great customer focused sales person, so we didn't spend much time on those areas.

I reeled a number of thoughts off the top of my head. I know I've missed some, it would be great to have your ideas. The non-prioritized thoughts were:

1. The major account rep has to understand the customer's business better than the customer does themselves. He has to understand the customer's markets, their customer's problem/issues, the customer's competition, and other opportunities for the customer to grow and improve their business.
2. The major account rep understands how the customer's business works, including: the culture and value system of the customer, how they get things done, the formal and informal organizational structure, the strengths and weaknesses, how they measure and manage performance.
3. The major account rep consistently brings the customer ideas and opportunities to improve their business, growing top and bottom lines, growing their share and presence in the market, and ways for them to achieve their top goals and priorities.
4. The major account rep effectively brings together people within the account, serving as a bridge for people in the account to communicate with each other. Often the major account rep will know more about what's happening than the people in the account.
5. The major account rep will consistently seek to expand the breadth and depth of their relationships within the account. She will not only build relationships with executives, but also build relationships at all levels of the account.
6. The major account rep will serve as an advocate for the customer within her own company. She will make certain any customer's issues are well handled. She will make sure the account's interests are represented as the company builds its strategies, policies and solutions/products.
7. The major account rep will leverage the resources of his own company to help grow the relationships between the two companies. This includes developing peer relationships between executives in the two companies, and building relationships across all levels of the organization.
8. The major account rep consistently brings her customer business justified solutions, not only to help the customer meet their goals, but to assure the rep achieves her goals for
   her own company in growing the business. These goals include revenue, satisfaction, margin, strategic projects/initiatives, etc.
9. The major account rep is a business manager, helping both the account and his own company achieve mutually beneficial business goals.
10. The major account rep does not waste her customer's time, or the time of the people in her own company. She creates value in every interchange. The rep knows they have achieved this when the customer thinks of the rep as "one of them," and the rep's own company thinks of the rep as "one of them."
11. The major account rep leaps over tall buildings with a single bound (running starts are OK).

I know I have missed some important things, what would you add?

Will Your Supplier Still Be Here Tomorrow?

For regular readers of this blog, you know I've been evangelizing rich collaboration and expressing concern about the health of the Supply Chain. If you want to re-read the post: If Your Suppliers Are In Trouble, Then You Are In Trouble.

I'm not the only person concerned about this. Today, I read an interesting article in CFO Magazine: Will Your Supplier Still Be Here Tomorrow? The article focuses on the supply chain in the automotive industry, but the issue applies to all industries.

Why write about this in a blog that focuses so much on Sales and Marketing? It's easy, the issue to me, as a sales professional, is: If I don't have great products, if I can't fulfill my customers' orders on a timely basis, if my product quality starts to decline; how will I be able to achieve my sales objectives.

I'd like to get your views on this issue and what your companies are doing. I welcome your comments, but on Monday, I will be publishing a link to a survey. Anyone who participates and completes the survey will get a copy of the results for free. Stay tuned, in the mean time, please provide your thoughts.

The Secrets To Losing Customers!

Yesterday and today, I've had to restructure a lot of what I had planned to accomplish. Our email server and our websites are hosted by Earthlink--everything went down yesterday. Late yesterday, email came back up--but we got bits and pieces of queued up emails delivered over several hours. Our websites are still down and we had planned to launch some major new things through the website at this time---clearly all of that is on hold, because we can't start pointing customers and prospects to a website that is not operational.

I hate to use this blog site as a bully pulpit to express my dissatisfaction with specific suppliers, but given my experience and Earthlink's handling of this situation over the past 36 hours--also given the idle time they have handed me, I have decided to use them as a case study for terrible customer service and sure fire examples of how to lose customers.

Many of us have become dependent on the tools and services provided by organizations like Earthlink. Disruptions in service cause disruptions in our business, consequently we tend to be hyper sensitive to service disruptions and outages.

Most of Earthlink appeared to be down yesterday. Thank goodness for Twitter, posts by other people in the same situation let me know that it wasn't my problem, but a major Earthlink outage. Apparently Earthlink did not think it worthwhile to find alternative ways to let customers know about an outage. For instance, I could get to the Earthlink sign in screen, but I couldn't get further. It would have saved me time and frustration if they had posted something on the opening page, outlining the problem. While frustrated, at least I would have known and they could have set a level of expectation: Lesson 1: When you have problems, let your customers at least know something is happening so you can set their expectation. Try to reach out to them proactively to alert them rather than catching them by surprise.

When Earthlink came back up, I immediately went to support and to Network Status. You can see it here. Basically, this has remained unchanged for the last 18 hours. When you look at the "Issues in Some Areas," they show very limited outages and never show the problems I and the rest of the world have experienced. When I went into Get Live Help, then I discovered virtually everything was down and they were working to address it. Lesson 2: When you have a problem, own up to it, don't hide it, you'll be found out.

This morning, email seemed back to normal but our websites were still down. I contact customer service, and the initial response was, "everything is working, it must be something with your site, let me look into it." Upon looking into it, the response was: "we are still having troubles with our website servers, so many organization's web sites are not working, we are working as hard as possible to correct the problem." Lesson 3: When you have a problem, don't lie to your customers about it, they will catch you in it, it makes them more upset.

When I asked them, "I've had to waste a lot of time signing into support, to find out this news, you could have saved me a lot of time and frustration by posting this at Network Status." The response was, "we will update network status." 4 hours after that call, the same static screen appears, there has been no update. Lesson 4: Read Lesson 3, also, when you make a commitment, be sure to fulfill it.

As I mentioned, I keep going back into the system to see if something has changed. I have learned that Network Status is a static screen that does not change and really does not show the real situation with the network---I guess it's there because you are supposed to have one of these screens when you are an ISP, I was under the mistaken impression that it was supposed to be operational. As you might guess, contacting customer support caused me to go through the same loop again.

So I'm stuck, all I can get is a response, "we are working on it." I've searched Earthlink's site, I've gone to their corporate site, there is no status update, no explanation of the outages they have experienced. I have not received an email explaining what happened or what is happening--though I do get their newsletter informing me how I can buy more stuff from them. Lesson 5: When you have had a problem and you have fixed it, get to the customers impacted, say you are sorry, and explain what happened and what you are doing to minimize recurrence.

While this may be counter intuitive, often, I have found companies that manage problems and communications with customers proactively, actually emerge with stronger relationships with customers. Most customers know problems happen. What customers want is to be informed and to see the problems resolved. Customers aren't interested in excuses and react negatively to attempts to hide the problem. Lesson 6: While you want to minimize problems for your customers, properly managing the problems, keeping your customers well informed can enhance your relationship with the customers.

I don't want to be unreasonable. Problems happen, while I might be upset, at if I am at least informed, kept up to date, and not lied to, I might be more sympathetic and patiently impatient. Cancellation of our accounts won't even be a rounding error to Earthlink, they will never notice we are gone. We are a very small customer.

So I've finished my venting, our web sites are still down. Have to look at revamping more of my day. I still have no idea when the problem will be fixed. I just went into network status and it still shows there are no problems.

Lost Opportunity --- It Takes Courage To Say You've Made A Mistake

Yesterday, I wrote an article about my experience with a Sales 2.0 tool and the lost opportunity the company had in not trying to learn about why I was cancelling my subscription.

My friend, Jill Konrath, saw the post and knew the company I was speaking of. She went to the CMO to make him aware of what had happened. He immediately recognized the lost opportunity and contacted me--not to try to win my business back but to learn so they could improve the product and experience. He said they were a young company, growing and learning to be better. Next week we have some time set aside to talk about my concerns and what they might do in the future. I am appreciative they are taking the time to listen to me.

However, the point of this post is not to give you a status update, but to comment on the courage it takes to stand up an acknowledge you have made a mistake. Too many times, we ignore it, we try to push the blame somewhere else, or we make excuses.

It takes real courage and character to admit you have made a mistake. We all make mistakes, no one expects us to be perfect. In my experience, while people may be angry for a moment, they most want to fix the issue and move on. Admitting you have made a mistake, taking immediate corrective action and moving forward is a phenomenal way to improve relationships with customers and prospective customers. It demonstrates your authenticity and that you care.

It could have been easy to blow off my complaint. After all, I'm just an opinionated, loud mouth consultant (we all know we are held in close to the same esteem as lawyers). Plus "no one reads that blog."

Kudos to the CMO and to this company for having the courage to recognize the lost opportunity, admit the mistake and give me a chance to express my opinion. We need more leaders and organizations like this. (Also, thanks to Jill for her help!)

Lost Opportunity---Take The Time To Learn From Defecting Customers

I've been experimenting for the past 6 weeks with a Sales 2.0 tool. Today, I decided to cancel the service, I wasn't really getting value from it.

I sent an email into the company asking to cancel the service (I've paid for the full month, so I asked that it be cancelled effective the end of the month). The company's customer service organization sent me a nice note saying my account has been cancelled. Other than the minor irritant of having a couple of weeks that I have paid for down the tubes, the transaction was handled efficiently.

However, the company lost a major opportunity. They could have cancelled the service and asked me why I was cancelling. They could have asked me to take a survey, they could have had someone call me to learn why I was dissatisfied. I would have been delighted to have done any of those.

So what has the company learned about my experience and why I cancelled? Could I have been recovered, perhaps I was doing things wrong and could have been coached on how to get what I done. Perhaps there were some fundamental things about the service that would also impact their potential success or retention of other customers.

Sometimes it isn't comfortable speaking with defecting customers, but it can be one of the most valuable experiences in learning how to improve and grow your business.

Sometimes All We Want Is Good Customers. Sometimes All Customers Want Is Good Vendors.

With this post, any doubt you may have had about me will be eliminated. You will know that I am schizoid, have multiple personalities, or some other disorder. In the last couple of months, I have written a number of times about establishing rich collaborative relationships and partnering with your customers. In this article, you may perceive me as reversing my position.

I'm reacting to a lot of things I hear sales and marketing people talk about these days. "Partnering" is the "it" word for sales and marketing these days. I've just been watching a marketing campaign and commercials by the CMO of a major corporation, a guy I really respect, announcing some new products. The tag lines focus on "partnering," and "we partner with you, not compete with you." I look at the materials, and they really are a pitch to get me to buy more stuff.

Not being one to pick on just one person, virtually every conversation I have with sales people and managers contains the "p-word." Everyone wants to partner with their customers. They talk about establishing partnerships, yet down deep, all we really want to do is sell more stuff.

Somehow, it seems the "p-word" is better than going to a customer and saying: "I think I understand what you are trying to achieve, your goals, needs and priorities. I think I have a solution that will exceed your requirements and provide you great value. If I can demonstrate our solution produces superior value, I would like you to buy it." I guess that's too sales-y. Somehow, it seems better to say we want to be your partner and to dance strangely around the fact that we just really want them to buy our stuff.

Sometimes---in fact more often than not, all we want to have a great customer-vendor relationship. One in which we provide products/services that solve a customer problem and create great returns for their investment. Sometimes---more often than not, that's all the customer wants. So why don't we just be direct and not complicate what we are trying to achieve with meaningless language, "we want to be your partner." Why don't we focus on providing great customer service, great products, and great buying experiences?

When I speak of establishing deep collaborative relationships/partnerships, I am thinking of relationships in which there is a deeper degree of commitment and interdependency between organizations. Partnerships are tough---70-80% fail. They require deep commitment, strong support at all levels, and lots of work. They can produce tremendous value and returns for each partner. However, no customer can afford to partner with all their vendors. No vendor can afford to partner with every customer. It is simply too expensive, too difficult to manage and does not produce the required returns for each side of the relationship.

Partnering and rich collaboration should be reserved for your most important and strategic suppliers. It should be reserved for the most strategic customers. I believe these relationships are critical to all organizations, but they don't represent the majority of relationships.

Sometimes, all we want is a great supplier, or a great customer. Many of the underpinnings to partnerships also apply to these relationships: creating value, great service, win/win, and many of the other principles.

Sometimes, as a customer, I want to go to people like this CMO, and say, "I don't want to be your partner. I just want to buy good products that meet my needs. Can you demonstrate your products does this better than the others I am considering?" Then I want them to sell to me.

Delivering Happiness! Zappo's

Zappo's is one of the hottest and most innovative companies around. This is an inspirational presentations by Tony Hsieh, their CEO. There are important lessons in this for any business professional.

Zappos - Startup2Startup - 03-26-09

View more presentations from zappos.

The Secret To Success Part 2---Make Customers Money!

A few days ago, I wrote about the secret to sales success---saving customers money. Well there's another secret, that may be more powerful than saving money---help your customers make money! Show them how you can help them increase sales and revenue.

Depending on the solutions you sell, it may require doing some real homework. So much of the time we focus on the expense side of the income statement, but we forget that our solutions can contribute to the revenue side.

Consider areas we overlook. Does your solution make your customer more responsive to their customers? For example, many IT systems solutions, while improving productivity and reducing costs, also improve the ability of your customer to respond to their customers. Improving responsiveness can help them improve their ability to win new deals.

Likewise, if your solution helps improve customer satisfaction, it can improve customer retention and drive increases in revenue.

With a little creative thought, you can discover many areas to help customers increase their revenues. Sometimes the easiest way to do this is to talk to different people in your customer. Typically, you may deal with operations, IT, finance, procurement or administrative operations. Try meeting with the sales, marketing and strategy people in your customers. You will discover all sorts of opportunities.

Recently, I completed a project with a large client. Their products typically helped their customers run very large telecommunications networks more efficiently and with higher availability. Usually, they justified their solutions on efficiency, reliability and cost reduction. As an experiment, we spoke to the VP's of sales and marketing for their customers.

We discovered a whole new range of benefits and capabilities my client's products already provided, but were not being exploited by their customers in driving revenue services. Their customers started offering new services---enabled by my clients' products. These services drove incremental revenues from their current customers and allowed them to attract new customers who wanted those services. We discovered a whole range of things that our client had taken for granted, or their customers did not understand that directly increased the revenues their clients could achieve.

In the current economy, everyone is searching for ways for growing their sales. The easiest way to grow yours is to show your customers how you help them grow theirs!

Focus On Your Customer's Need To Buy, Not Your Need To Sell!

All sales people, today, sell solutions. At least that’s what most sales people say they are doing. If sales people are really acting consultatively, selling solutions, why are so many customers sick of sales pitches? We hear customers saying:

• "They (the sales people) always come in here pitching their latest products and
  technologies without telling me how it solves our problems."
• "They say they have solutions before they even know my problems."
• "The sales person doesn’t understand my business."
• "They tell me about the products, I have to figure out whether it will solve my problems!"
• "They just want to push their products without understanding our needs!"
  

Most sales people focus on their need to sell, not their customer’s need to buy. Putting the customer first in the selling process is simple, yet enables sales people to achieve real success. It enhances the sales person’s relationships with their customer. It enables them to clearly demonstrate their value. Finally, it is key to competitive success!

What is the Sales Person’s Need To Sell?

Sales people have a need to sell. We focus on sales targets and commissions. We love our products and "gee-whiz" technologies. We want our customers to be as excited about the latest widget our company has introduced as we are. We want to please our managers and gain the approval of our peers. It could be the latest in semiconductor, computer, software or communications technology, or the hottest new fashions, or the best new consumer products, or the great new financial services products.

How many times have we gone to our customers to present them our hot new products, only to find them not as excited as we are? How can that be? Why won’t they buy? Don’t they really understand what these products can do? Don’t they understand we have quotas to meet and commission to earn!

What about the mid-year push for orders? Why don’t customers take advantage of our fantastic deals?

What about the retailer who won’t give us that end-cap for our latest merchandising scheme? Doesn’t she know that our hot new advertising programs will have the products flying off the shelves!

The answer to all these issues is simple. Customers don’t care about our need to sell; they are only worried about solving their business problems! Focusing on the customer need to buy is critical understanding how we can help solve our customers’ business problems.

What is the Customer Need To Buy?

All customers have goals and objectives. The customer need to buy is the result of business problems, opportunities or "pain" influencing their ability to achieve their goals or objectives. In any situation, these needs may be business oriented like:

• Achieve X% revenue growth in the next 12 months.
• Increase market share to establish leadership within their market segments.
• Decrease costs by Y% in the next 12 months.
• Increase profitability in the next quarter.
• Improve the R-acronyms: ROI, ROA, ROE, ROS, ROCA.
• Decrease "design" cycle time - or whatever cycle time they care about.
• Improve quality or customer service or satisfaction.
• Overcome a competitive threat.
• …and the list can go on!
  

The need to buy can be personally oriented like:

• Assure success of a project in which the individual has committed a lot of
  personal time and energy.
• Achieve success on this project to get that next promotion.
• Reduce workload, hassle or stress on the job.
• Accomplish certain objectives so that I can maximize my bonus or get a salary increase.
• Achieve goals to get a good performance review.
• …and, likewise, this list can go on!
  

Whatever the business or personal goals, these establish the customer need to buy. Concentrating on these needs will shorten your selling cycle and maximize your odds of success.

Determining The Customer Need To Buy
Let’s take the mystery out of using these to determine the customer need to buy. Following a few simple steps will help you improve your ability to be customer focused:

Do your homework. Become a student on your customer’s industry and markets. Learn what their customers are asking of them. Learn what their competitors are doing. Understand important trends and directions driving the industry. Understand their key measures of success. Try to anticipate the problems, challenges, and opportunities they face. Consider the following:

• Read the customer’s annual and quarterly reports, 10K’s, 10Q’s and proxy
  statements.
• Read their press releases. Read their product brochures and
  sales literature. Read the speeches the CEO and other executives are making.
• Surf the Internet to find their web site and those of their competitors. See
  how they present themselves to the world. Leverage LinkedIn, Blogs and others sources on the web to become knowledgeable about the customer.
• Read the trade magazines and press representing their industries.
• Read the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Fortune and other general business publications to "scan the environment."
• Do the same with their competitors.
• Use this knowledge to prepare your meetings with the customer.
  

Determine the need to buy very early in the selling cycle. In qualifying an opportunity, one of the first things you need to understand is if the customer has a real problem. If the customer doesn’t have a real problem---one that you can solve---you’re wasting your time! No need to buy equals no sale!

How do we determine the need to buy: Ask the customer, shut up, listen, then probe. Consider some of the following areas:

• Determine the customer’s overall business goals, strategies and their customer
  and competitive environment. In addition to understanding the business, try to
  understand how these impact the customer personally.
• Understand the problems, opportunities and challenges your customer faces in achieving the business goals. Seek to quantify these to understand the magnitude of the impact on the customer.
• Learn how the business problems affect the customer’s job performance. Ask your customer how management will measure their performance. Attempt to understand the personal stake the customer has in solving the problem.
• Prioritize and quantify each of the needs the customer has identified. Understand those that are most important and separate those from those that represent annoyances.
  

Write down the customer need to buy, validate it with the customer. Develop a simple description of the problem or opportunity:

• Write their need to buy in clear sentences. Typically, they have multiple needs.
  If you have done the right job, you can define these needs in a few short
  sentences. Make sure that you have quantified the impact of each need.
• Beware of describing the problem in terms of your need to sell! Customer
  needs to buy are rarely described in terms of your product and services. If you
  are describing the need to buy in these terms, you are more likely describing
  your need to sell.
• Verify what you have written down with the customer to make sure you have understood and prioritized the needs to buy appropriately. Gain the customer’s agreement on the problem.
• Gain their agreement that if you can present the solution providing the greatest value in solving the problem, they will buy your solution.
• Before spending any more time on the opportunity, make sure you have a solution that addresses their need to buy.

Focus your sales strategy on demonstrating how your solution provides the greatest value in solving their problems. Clearly understanding the customer need to buy enables you to concentrate your efforts. You won’t be sidetracked, you won’t waste time. You can clearly and directly present your solution to their problems in terms that are meaningful to them.

Understanding your customer’s need to buy is the shortest path to satisfying your need to sell!

Dramatically Increase Sales!

Seth Godin seems to come up with the simplest and thought provoking ideas. I can't improve on it, so I will only repeat it. But I encourage you to go to his site, and read this and the 100's of others he has.

Seth's idea for the "Easiest Cheap Way To Dramatically Increase Sales:"

Call or write your customers, saying:

"I know that times might be tough for you. Is there anything I can do to pitch in and help?"

Thank you, Seth!

Moving From Customer Acquisiton To Customer Engagement

For some strange reason, in the past few days, at least four different executives have called me to speak about changes they see with their customers markets and organizations. The conversations all began at different points, for differing reasons, but seemed to be converging on a central issue: The need for organizations, marketing, and sales to focus on Customer Engagement as critical to success and growth in the future.

I have to admit, I am still sorting out some of the issues and what they mean, but some of the things we see are:

1. Traditional means of acquiring customers is not working. Yesterday, I had a spirited discussion with a colleague in France around the topic: Cold Calling is Dead, How Do We Leverage Social Media for marketing! Sales people, don't cheer to quickly, I don't think cold calling is dead, but I do believe the nature of cold calling needs to change. As an example, every day, I have conversations with new people-prospects-potential clients. These are, for all intents, cold calls, but the nature of how we chose to engage in a conversation has changed. In our discussion, we talked about how our own work was changing and the role of new social networking tools was changing the types of conversations, who we engaged, and the means by which we carried on those conversations.

Yesterday, I participated in a review of one of my client's demand generation programs. They have well defined and refined programs, well targeted lists, and a reasonable value proposition. Years ago, their programs would have been considered by many to represent best practices. Now, while the programs are producing results, they are far less than two years ago.

2. This morning the EVP of Sales for a major technology company called me to shoot the breeze about what's happening in the markets. His view was the differentiator for many organizations was going to be customer acquisition. As he looked at his company, his competitors, his customers and the markets they participate in, he viewed that most of the companies were at parity in terms of costs, pricing, product offerings, quality, and other factors. He believed the critical success factor for his company would be the ability to acquire and support customers in a way that differed from any one else.

We started talking about what that meant---I saw were moving beyond the traditional view of customer acquisition to a different way of engaging customers and potential customers in conversations about their business.

3. No sooner had I hung up the phone, then another call from the VP of Strategic Accounts for another company called me. I felt like deja vu all over again! But the conversation also had a different twist. He was having a heated discussion with the CEO of his company that just because they had Salesforce working well for their company, they couldn't stop their marketing activities. He was trying to convince the CEO (who was trying to cut people and money), that this tool was just a tool, but could not displace many of the programs they had for generating business. As we got into the discussion, it became clear that his CEO, was starting to read too many blogs, getting too many tweets, and had gotten a big dose of social media over the holidays and saw that as the salvation for business generation.

For some strange reason, I could go on with the stories, all they do is reinforce the fact that profound changes are afoot.

To some degree, I think the silver lining to the economic and financial challenges we all face is that thinking about how we do business is no longer a nice thing to do, it may mean survival. The current crises gives those of us who take the opportunity, the chance to profoundly change the way we build relationships with our customers, retain them and acquire them. I think those organizations that choose to engage customers in a different way will emerge the winners.

I'm still sorting a lot of this stuff out. I don't know the answers, but have some suspicions about the changes.

1. I think the old ways are far from being dead. Cold calling is not dead, prospecting, advertising (traditional), trade shows, direct marketing, telemarketing, websites, SEO, "adwords." and all the stuff we have grown up with and which consume much of our customer acquisition and retention time, money, and energy is here to stay----but needs to be evolved and modified.

2. I'm still trying to figure out things like LinkedIn and Facebook and how they contribute to business development--at more than a personal level, but in helping enterprises do business differently. I'm convinced there is a role for these (other than advertising), but I (and others) are still learning. I'm starting to see some of my clients engage their customers and partners in very interesting ways, using of all things, You Tube. Their customers and partners are taking matters into their own hands and promoting my client's products in very interesting ways. Fortunately, my client was smart enough to encourage it rather than try to stop it.

3. Likewise, I know that blogging has a role, but at an enterprise level, a lot of challenges remain. I recent newspaper article discussed the challenges of corporate blogs and their believability. I'm also sure that things like Twitter have a role to play (I'm almost embarrassed to say I just signed up yesterday and have yet to send my first tweet --- I think that's what they're called).

In the coming years, rather than displacing anything, I think we will see creative intermingling of these tools and approaches, creating a richer dialog and experience with current and potential customers.

In the end, all of these things are just tools. It's important that we not lose sight of what we are really talking about. Business growth, marketing, and selling in the coming years will require us to engage our customers differently.

I think we will start having conversations not presentations. I think customer acquisition will become less about marketing and selling, and more about collaboration and partnering.

I think the number, depth, and richness of the conversations will increase profoundly---the tools and technologies enable this---they also enable all this to happen in real time.

I think organizations, buyers and sellers, will be more selective about the number and quality of the relationships they establish. After all, this takes time, energy, commitment, and has a cost. No one can afford to have deep relationships with everyone.

I think fluid networks of "just in time" collaborations will become important to building business. If each organization can only afford to develop and nurture a limited number of deep relationships, a way to grow and expand is to begin to network those relationships in real time, when they produce value.

While things change, some stay the same. Relationships are important, the virtual world will complement, but not displace deep human relationship--face to face or voice to voice. The traditional tools we have used will still have a place, but have to be positioned with all the other tools to create richer customer experiences.

Sales will have to change. For the first, consultative or solution selling must become the fabric of the sales process, not just buzz words. Sales professionals will have to leverage and use the new tools to enrich their relationships with customers and influencers in the markets. They will have to move from pitching to listening to engaging the customer in a conversation.

Maybe I'm wordsmithing, but I think we are talking about something different than customer retention or acquisition. Those sound too one way or push oriented to me. I'm also not talking about the pull orientation in some of the new social media (or traditional consumer advertising).

Somehow the concept of Customer Engagement seems to be the closest to embracing all of what needs to be done to survive, grow and thrive.

Does this make sense or am I just playing with words?

A Night Sleeping On The Floor At Houston Intercontinental, Gate B85

It's 6:20 am, Central Time, I'm in the President's Club in Terminal B at Houston Intercontinental. The trials of winter travel started for me last night. I barely made my connecting flight to the East Coast last night. We finally left the gate, 90 minutes late.

Six and a half (that's right 6.5) hours later, still sitting on the tarmac, along with dozens of other planes waiting to be de-iced by one of Houston's 2 de-icers, the pilot turned back, we had burned through our fuel.

Turned out to be the same plight of dozens of other planes. My guess is well over a thousand people spent the night sleeping on the floor somewhere in Houston Intercontinental. I found a comfortable spot near gate B85. (Pictures to come later)

The reason, I am telling this story is that I noticed something really different than I have seen in 20 plus years of business travel. While people were frustrated, I didn't see the hostility and bad behavior I've seen in the past. People, were relatively patient and calm.

Likewise, the overworked, overstressed gate and ticketing agents were very patient and somehow seemed to keep smiles on their faces. After they re-booked everyone, around 3:00am, they brought pillows, blankets, and food around. They did everything they could to make us as comfortable as possible. My compliments to the agents at Continental Airlines.

Except for the guy snoring 30 feet from me, it hasn't been that bad an experience.

This gets me to the reason I'm writing. Last night and this morning, I have seen and participated in a civility, patience, and good humour that I have never experienced in business travel. Usually it is exactly the opposite of this.

I wonder if during these tough economic times, we are all learning to be better people. I hope we are----maybe every cloud does have a silver lining.