Archives for category: Sales

The Easiest Rule of Sales is the Rule of 3

November 3, 2014 //

One of the easiest – and most overlooked – rules of sales is this.

You have a satisfied customer, a delighted customer even, who’s seeing the returns or rewards from the product or service you have relatively recently delivered.

Ask them for 3 referrals. ‘What 3 people can you think of that would also benefit from this product or service, whom we could approach with your blessing?’

Easy. Nothing wrong with asking them to do a bit of work drumming up 3 names for you, that sort of thing is the hallmark of any great partnership. Of course they should be 3 people that don’t compete with your customer.

Think about this for a moment: If you had 2 or 3 personal recommendations from every satisfied customer, you might never need to do demand generation again…

Tags Reference, Referral

Categories Customers, Sales

The Bureaucracy of Big Companies

October 29, 2014 //

Working with big companies is not like working with small companies. The reasons are obvious of course, and it’s probably why large organisations try – and often fail – to engender a fast-moving and entrepreneurial culture.

Big companies have deeper pockets, so the rewards are bigger, but you also need to factor in the risks, the processes, the number of people involved in working with you, because they’re all deeper as well.

It simply takes longer to get things done.

A few years ago I worked in the tech security space, getting case studies written up with customers. The smaller the customer, the quicker the sign-off, the easier the process. It’s a joy working for smaller companies that can take decisions quickly. The downside is that their ‘logo’ carries less weight than a ‘battleship’ blue chip that takes you what seems like an eternity to turn around.

Make sure you have a good balance of small, medium and large sales opportunities in your sales pipeline. The big deals are great when they come in, but you can’t afford to have your hopper full of big slow-moving deals that can easily get stuck and leave you flapping in the breeze. If you can make your number from the small and medium deals, then the big one, when it comes in, is a rather large layer of icing on your cake.

Tags Big, time

Categories Customers, Sales

Are You Ready to Buy?

October 27, 2014 //

I wrote recently about asking for the order. It’s a pretty fundamental part of selling, and the good sales people delight in it, whereas the less good dread it.

The key to asking this question at the right time is this: is your customer ready to buy? They will never commit to the sale until they’re ready to buy. Some sales people ask for the order too early, get frustrated and tick off their prospect. Some ask too late, and go hungry.

Just as you follow a sales process, so your customer follows a buying process. Your sales process should be aligned to your customers’ buying process, not the other way round. You can’t sell to someone until you know how they want to buy.

When you guide your customer through all the steps you know they need to take to make the purchase, you know they’re ready to buy.

Why not use this as your closing question: ‘Are You Ready to Buy?’ They can only say yes or versions of no. If no, you have more to do to get them to be ready.

Tags Closing, Order, Ready

Categories Customers, Sales

Asking for the Order

October 24, 2014 //

A lot of people don’t like selling. They avoid careers in sales. They love community and people and conversation, but something doesn’t feel right to them about selling.

Even some people in selling don’t like selling. By which I mean they don’t like the bit at the end of selling.

The bit at the end is asking for the order. It should be the easiest part of the process. You’ve done all the work after all.

‘OK, if I’ve covered all your questions, and you’re happy, can we proceed with your order?’ This goes two ways:

– ‘Yes, I think we’re good to go.’ Job done, pretty much.

– ‘Erm, no, I don’t think so, not yet.’ To which you follow with. OK, no problem. What is outstanding before we can move forward?’ And so on. Until you get the deal, or you lose it through being outsold, or there never was a deal – in which case you didn’t qualify properly – or you never should have been in the deal to start with – in which you didn’t qualify properly, or it’s a tender, which is a different kettle of fish altogether.

Asking for the order is a part of the process you come to hate if you haven’t done your job well enough.

I used to work for a guy who had his own family-owned and -run design and print business. He loved asking for the order and he was good at it. He used to joke: ‘OK so we’re ready to go at £9K? Great, I’ll put the order through for £10K, and we’ll invoice you for £11K.’ Lovely stuff.

Tags Closing, Order, Selling

Categories Customers, Sales

Value to You, Value to Me

October 17, 2014 //

In a previous post on account management, I talked about creating opportunities to sell more stuff to your customers.

The value has to work both ways though. Your customer needs to feel they will get value from transacting business with you, but you need to feel that you will get value from the deal too.

If you don’t feel like you both got a great deal, then one side feels like the transaction was unequal and the balance has shifted. This is a major cause of customers churning. They don’t feel like they got value for their money. They didn’t see the return they were expecting.

If you don’t feel like you got a great deal, it’s probably because you ended up having to do too much work or deliver too much for what you were receiving. The opportunity cost to you of giving up another deal with a better margin can be significant.

Make sure the value to you – value to me equilibrium is sustained to keep long term relationships with your customers.

Tags account management, Value

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Create to Accumulate

October 15, 2014 //

In a previous post on account management, I talked about the joy of discovering white space, that happy place where there might be an opportunity for you to sell something else to your existing customer. I say ‘might’, because you don’t yet know if there is an opportunity. There’s something else you need to do.

In order for there to be an opportunity, you need to figure out if there is there something of value that you can deliver to your customer, something that your customer needs.

Researching your customer is probably the most valuable use of your time. The better you know them, the more you can help them. When you profile your customer, analyse their performance, figure out what they’re trying to do with the business, where their problems are, then you can start to figure our what they need to do to fix those problems. If there is something you can provide to help them fix those problems, you have created an opportunity to do business with them.

The best thing about this is that, right now, this opportunity is not a competitive one. It only exists when you proactively propose it to your customer. You created it :-).

Tags account management, Create

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

To Boldly Go into White Space

October 11, 2014 //

This is not about Star Trek and the most famous split infinitive in screen history. This is about finding additional value and revenues in the most important area of your business, namely your existing accounts.

When you manage opportunities, you can only win a certain percentage of the sales opportunities that exist, that you have either heard about or that your customers or prospects invited you to tender for. To get control back in your sales performance you need to do something quite obvious, quite simple, but to many people – quite radical. You have to create opportunities. But from where? From the realm known as account management.

One of the most powerful things you can do is draw a simple matrix. Across the top axis is the list of things you sell, all your specific products or services groupings. Down the side you put the list of your all existing customers. Then you take your customer records and plot which customers take which of your offerings, colouring in the box at the intersection of the particular customer and the particular product or service. Maybe you can colour the intersections differently to distinguish between different groups of customers or groups of products or services.

The most common colour in your matrix is likely to be the one you miss, the one you can’t see. Yes, it’s the white space. The white space is the area beloved of graphic designers because it lets the important content breathe on the page or screen. In account management the white space is beloved of sales and marketing people because it is the land of opportunity, the place where you haven’t yet sold something into your customer.

At this stage, of course, you haven’t created any opportunities. You’ve simply identified where they might exist.

Tags account management, Create, White space

Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

There’s No Prize for Coming Second

October 10, 2014 //

OK, so there are sometimes prizes for coming second. You might have raised your profile for the next opportunity, or gotten onto the next short-list automatically, or even learnt a lot for the next time, but you won’t be generating money for your organisation from this lost deal, you won’t be making work for your colleagues – in a good way.

Business-to-business sales opportunities are often more complex than we realise and in 99% of them we don’t have all the information – and I mean all the information – that we need to optimise our bid. Here are some things to think about:

– Always get your people (and yourself) to follow the same tried and trusted process for selling. If you’re not all following the same process, you don’t know where you are, you have nothing measurable or objective with which to run your business

– Always analyse and qualify your sales opportunities. Can you win the business? Can you deliver the business? Do you even want the business?

– How best should you compete for the business, and how best will your competitors compete?

– What’s the customer trying to do? What’s stopping them from doing it (something must be, or you wouldn’t have an opportunity)? How will you best help them do it, better than any other competitive option (including doing nothing)?

– What are the politics in your customer organisation? Somebody always wants somebody to win, right? Who is it? Are they important? Who do they want to win? What should you do if it’s you? What should you do if it’s not you?

– How will they decide on the business? What’s the process? What’s important to the customer? What’s important to the individuals inside the customer? How might these different wants and needs play out? How can you take advantage of that?

– What are the steps you need to take, the things you need to do, to progress and win the deal? What should you not do because they don’t progress the deal?

There’s an awful lot to do to win deals, and win them consistently, but it’s an awful lot worth doing.

Tags B2B, Business-to-business, Winning

Categories Sales, Strategy

Standing on the Shoulders of Competitive Giants

October 8, 2014 //

It would be a lot easier to live in a business world without competitors. You could spend your time creating truly valuable solutions for your customer, knowing that you would get the return you deserve. In the real word, however, as you strive to maximise your sales and win as many of them as possible, you need to put in place the best strategy for each opportunity.

A lot of historical business strategy theory borrowed from the military strategist Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War. He has fallen from favour somewhat in the last few years as business has moved to a more collaborative environment. ‘There are no competitors, only potential partners’ is a refrain you’ll sometimes hear.

Here, however, are three of the key principles documented by this Chinese warrior two-and-a-half thousand years ago, adapted for sales opportunities, that I think still have validity:

– Know your product (or service), your customer, and your competition, and you need not fear the result of a hundred sales opportunities
– Know only your product (or service) and not the customer or the competition, and for every victory gained, you will suffer a defeat
– If you don’t know your product (or service), your customer, or your competition, you shall succumb in every battle

In other words, do your homework and planning and your effort will be rewarded.

Tags Competition, warfare

Categories Sales, Strategy

The Sales Opportunity – How You Doin’?

October 6, 2014 //

When you’re selling, the ‘sale’ is the ideal situation, the end result you’re aiming at. ‘Opportunity’ is the unit of currency that you measure your life by. It represents the collection of granular, discrete items that govern our selling lives and keep us awake at night. This is ironic when you consider that the word ‘opportunity’ means a situation or position that is favorable, rather than unfavorable. If we qualify them properly, we should only have opportunities in our forecast that are opportunities in the true sense of the word.

Managing a sales opportunity, especially a complicated opportunity in a business-to-business situation where the ticket price is high, the process is a series of longish steps, and many people are involved in buying what you have, is about constantly asking yourself one essential question ‘how am I doing?’ More specifically, ‘how am I doing in this opportunity?’ compared with the other competitors eyeing the prize, and compared with the other possible outcomes – apart from you winning – that could result.

There are a number of facets to this question, such as the following:

– what’s the opportunity like?

– how can we win it?

– how can others win it?

– how can we counter them?

– what’s going on inside the buying organisation?

– what’s going on inside the heads of the important people in the buying organisation?

– what is the set of information we need to make the best decisions and what do we need to do to win?

With every important new piece of information about the opportunity, and everything important that happens in the opportunity, you need to pose – and answer – the big question, tweaking your plan of activities for winning accordingly. It’s like plotting your way around a golf course or your ship back to the harbour.

Good opportunity management is about enabling you to respond to the question ‘How you doin’? with an ‘At the moment, I’m doing well, thanks!’ answer.

Tags Opportunity

Categories Customers, Sales

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