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

Account Management – Take and Then Give?

October 3, 2014 //

In the world of web 2.0 ad social media, we’re so used to hearing the phrase ‘give – and then take’ to describe how you earn the trust and followship – a new word I just coined, such is the bounty of stream of consciousness – before you reap the rewards. Could it be then that account management is really the reverse of that concept?

Winning brand new business is hard, as we know. If you’re not doing your own prospecting, you can only win a percentage of the deals that your customers or your friendly marketing department put in front of you, and in this way you’re not in proper control of your business. Worse, you’re missing out on real revenues that will either be allocated to other projects or scooped up by your competitors, who, don’t forget, may count your customers as their accounts too.

You need to maximize the size of the field you’re already playing in. You need a framework for finding and creating opportunities from the key customers you already work with. It’s not a coincidence that it’s 4 times as easy to sell to a current customer compared to a new one. This is the realm of account management. It puts you in control of your business, and instead of waiting for deals to be put in front of you, you’re putting the deals in front of your customer, and you both win.

This is why in many ways the account management approach is the opposite of the ‘give and then take’ philosophy of social networking. You take what information you can from your existing account, strategise on it, and turn that knowledge into insight you can give to your customer, which they value enough to pay you for.

So when you’re wondering where your sales are going to come from, look at what you sell to your existing companies, do your homework and figure out what else you can sell to them that helps them address the problems they haven’t fixed yet. You’re being proactive and creating something that may not have existed before you put the work in. Creating is everything in sales.

Tags Account, Management

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

What Are You Waiting For?

October 1, 2014 //

You’ve done all the homework, all the prep on your latest big project. You’ve sounded people out, you’ve gotten buy-in, feedback. You’ve iterated the plan a few times, all your resources are in place, people have been briefed and are ready to go. And now it’s time to push the button.

What are you waiting for? ‘If I just wait a few days, just in case the situation changes, I may get more information in…’

The longer you delay, the more paralysed you get, the worse the fear becomes, the greater the inertia.

You’re not waiting for anything except the fear of failure to increase. Go!!!

Tags Execution

Categories Planning, Strategy

Wants and Needs

September 29, 2014 //

One of the first things I learnt in economics was the difference between needs and wants, and how price indices were calculated using a ‘basket’ of essential items, items you needed to buy on a regular basis.

A want is a nice to have. It’s something you’d like, something you may even lust after, but you don’t need it. A need is something you must have, and if you don’t get it, something else you don’t want to happen will happen .

As marketers, we need to develop and highlight products and services that people need. If people want them, but don’t need them, we don’t have compelling products or services and we don’t have a sale.

As sales people, we need to create or accentuate need in the minds of the buyers, as they won’t buy unless they have to, unless they need to, unless they see a return on their expenditure or a problem taken away.

We all should gravitate towards needs, scarcity and value. We should eschew wants, dearth, and lack of value.

Tags Need, Want

Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Selling to People Too Busy to Buy From You

September 26, 2014 //

Even when you’re convinced you have a strong case for your prospect investing in you, it can still be really, really hard to let your prospect know that. These people are so busy it seems they don’t have the time or the inclination to fix the situation by talking with you, and that’s usually because they’re being approach by 19 other people who feel they have the answer to the prospect’s problems.

These people are practically impossible to reach. They don’t take calls, they won’t take meetings, they don’t read your emails, they bin your brochures, they’re ‘in a meeting’ if you call into their office. So how do you get through to them to persuade them that you are one of the 3 things they really must do on a given day?

There are three very important things to bear in mind. Firstly, you have to keep your message succinct. You need to be able to articulate in a clear, understandable fashion what you can do for these people. You will inevitably get their voicemail or their gatekeeper when you call, so you need to crystallise this when you leave your message. After all, you want them to call you back, so if you can’t get to the point quickly, they will never hear it.

For example: ‘Hi Jane, this is Paul Dilger. I can reduce your working week by 5 hours. I know this because it’s what our customers tell us. I need 20 minutes of your time to prove it to you. You can call me back on 12345678. Thanks for listening.’

Or maybe: ‘Hi Jane, this is Paul Dilger. My research tells me you’re only invoicing 85% of the work you’re actually doing for your clients. I can get that up to 100% within a week with our software. That’s an extra 15% for zero extra effort. You can get me on 12345678 to see how it works. Thanks for listening.’

Secondly, you need to make sure that what you’re selling is a major priority for them. Will it hurt them if they don’t fix it, or can they put up with it? If you’re not important to them, you have no chance.

Thirdly, you have to make it straightforward for them to deal with you, including buying from you. Simplicity is the key. Simple is harder to do, but yields better rewards.

For those with a major thirst for this subject area, there’s plenty of really good stuff written about the methodology of selling to busy people. Jill Konrath‘s SNAP Selling is a good example.

Tags Busy, time

Categories Marketing, Sales

Nice to Have Means Don’t Have

September 24, 2014 //

If you’re in marketing and sales, your product will generally be perceived in one of two ways. It’s either a ‘nice to have’ or a ‘must have’. A must have is just that, something your buyer must have, and ideally by a certain time. These are the two conditions of the ‘opportunity’ holy grail known as BANT, where N is need and T is time.

I used to work in the email security business. Talk about a must have product. IT managers would call up on a daily basis either worried about the latest global virus to hit or because their network had just turned toxic from some ‘trojan’ and they didn’t want to be caught again. It wasn’t uncommon to hear them say things like ‘the CEO wants this sorted by the weekend or else, can you help us?’.

A nice to have is something you can live without. It means you don’t have a problem that needs fixing. You can sit on it for a while, do nothing – the secret, sneaky competitor of the sales person – or even try and fix it yourself. The way to figure this out for your product or service is to put yourself in the customers’ shoes and say ‘OK what will happen if we don’t do this?’ If nothing major will happen, you have a nice to have.

If you have a product or service that is perceived to be nice to have, you have no opportunity, you have no sale, you have a problem. Then you need to start building a must have case, such as ROI, TCO (total cost of ownership) or the lost revenues or savings from delaying a decision.

If you have something that people feel they can’t do without, it is indeed a thing of beauty.

Tags Need

Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Number 1 Rule for Your Website Home Page

September 22, 2014 //

What’s the number one rule for the home page of your website? It’s a pretty obvious one, but you’d be surprised at how many websites fail when tested against it.

When you go to a website for the first time, you want to know one thing: What do you do?

In other words:

– who are you?

– what do you do?

– how will this benefit me or my company?

This should not be difficult for you to address, regardless of your business.

Put it in a prominent place on your home page – or your landing page for whatever demand generation exercise you’re doing – so people can form a quick opinion as to whether what you have can help them. Otherwise they’ll leave frustrated. Why else do you think people typically abandon a home page way more than 50% of the time?

Don’t forget that you know your company well; how could people not know what you do? But you haven’t seen the website for the first time in a long time…

Tags Digital Marketing, Website

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Urgent vs Important

September 17, 2014 //

One of the first business lessons I learnt was about prioritising between urgent and important.

In a busy business there are 10 important things you should do every day, and yet you will only properly address 3 of them. Something has to give.

Of all the things you need to do, what are the important ones? What are the urgent ones? Are any both? Are any neither? If they’re neither, well that’s obvious. If the thing you need to do is urgent, but not important, you shouldn’t do it. You should delegate it or discount it altogether, but communicate to the would-be beneficiary the reason for your decision as early as you can so they’re not left in the lurch.

So that leaves you with the important things, and let’s assume for now you have all the important things on your list, including the things you’re avoiding, afraid of, or don’t want to do. While it makes loads of sense to break big things into smaller pieces in order to make progress, the temptation is to do the small important things first, to get them out of the way, because you know that you have to do the big important thing anyway so it will get done come hell or high water.

This approach puts you under unnecessary pressure, affects the quality of your work and turns your long day into an even longer one, which you can sustain for only so long. So how to rank the important things, some of which might be urgent? Some ‘managing up’ is required here, because your boss might be leaning on you for the output that she or he feels is the must important and pressing. What should drive the ranking is the only criterion that really matters, namely the value to your customers. You need to communicate early and often with your boss and make them aware of what is driving the order of the things you need to do.

And what if you can’t separate that handful of things that are all of equal weight and all help your customers be more successful? Well, then you need to get help or suck it up, safe in the knowledge that you are driving up your value as you drive up the value of the people who are the reason you’re in business.

Tags Important, Urgent

Categories Customers, General, Strategy