Dealing with Prospect’s Perception of Risk

Bob Apollo has hit the nail on the head with his recent post regarding dealing with “prospect’s perception of risk” http://hub.tm/?rGvIg.  Sales teams that don’t explore the prospect’s perception of risk throughout the buying process risk failure or no decision.  Bob outlines three questions to explore, which expose the impact of the issue being addressed by the buying process:

• What has caused the issue to become important at this point?
• Who else is affected or impacted by this issue?
• What would be the cost/impact of not dealing with this issue?

The answers to these questions will provide a roadmap to other stakeholders, and provide a means to avoid “no decision”. 

 

I recommend expanding Bob’s thesis and including a line of questioning and discussion which will expose the stakeholder’s individual professional and personal “wins” associated with the successful resolution of the problem to be addressed.  By understanding the impact on individual stakeholders, sales teams have an additional qualifier as to the individual and organizational focus on the successful implementation of a solution.

What Business Problem do you Solve?

I had a conversation recently with a real sales professional who reminded me in simple and direct terms, what I consider to be an imperative in sales discussions-WHAT BUSINESS PROBLEM DO YOU SOLVE?  He is in the sales training business (http://www.bettersellsolutions.com), and described an exercise with sales teams where he has them write down their best sale in the last six months.  Evidently the responses are 100% similar- “I sold 500 widgets to Acme Technology for XXX,XXX dollars.”  There is never a response that says I saved Acme Technology XXX,XXX dollars by eliminating bottlenecks in their distribution channels, and allowing them to expand into new markets…” 

It is essential to understand the business problem you solve, and drive the qualification discussion to that capability specifically.  In the best case, your discussion will result in a real opportunity that has high visibility within the prospective organization. In the 2nd best case you will know quickly that your capability is not a priority for the prospect,  which will allow you to move on to another prospect.

Does your team need a Sales Playbook?

There are several levers to pull in bringing a sales team to perform at the highest levels.  One of the most compelling is to provide each sales exec with a “Playbook” which details a road-map for managing each sales opportunity.  In a perfect world, the Sales Playbook would be deployed both on-line and as a document to facilitate different use cases.  Here’s the table of contents and description of one built by a management team I served on.

1. Message Summary by vertical market:  These summaries include your company’s high level message supported by three proof point descriptions that are the core of your discussions with any prospect.  These proof point descriptions should start with a series of “What if you could…” questions and then a brief high level description of how your solution addresses the issue.   This content will reappear throughout the sales process in the form of phone scripts, written communications/proposals, presentations etc.  It is important to employ your best minds and winning sales processes to develop these “meta-messages”.  Management opportunity:  Coach sales team to fully absorb these messages and be able to deliver them in a compelling fashion.
2. Ideal Prospect Company Profile:  Take at look at your best “wins” over the past 18 months.  What types of companies were they?  What industry?  What was the business problem solved?  Who in the prospect company was worried about it?  What were the most impactful parts of your sales strategy and tactics.  Map it all out in detail.  Your sales team now has a profile to match their prospects against, or to seek new prospects who are closely aligned.  Management opportunity:  inspect and compare prospect targets in each territory plan against ideal prospect.
3. Ideal prospect (person) within the company:  This should be easy given the work you did on #2.  What titles and responsibilities engaged themselves in the buying process, and which ones were the most enthusiastic and engaged?  It’s a good idea to identify the actual buyers here too.  In these times that almost always a C-Level person who may not have engaged in the buying process until nearer the end, but it is important to identify them and seek them out as early as possible in future opportunities.  Management opportunity:  Inspect each account plan and ensure the “ideal prospect(s) are identified.
4. Sales Process Script:  Visually map out your sales process with descriptions and qualifiers for each stage.  Define what completed actions are required to promote a prospect to the next stage.
5. Qualifying, Probing, and Follow-up Questions:  Using real-life examples, capture the best and most impactful  ”questions” in each category.  This section is “fluid” and should be updated regularly with new entries.  Management opportunity:  Ensure your team is facile with these questions.  Reinforce with role plays and inspect for them on sales calls.
6. Competitive Analysis:  Gather your senior sales executives and management team and capture your best practices for dealing with competitive pressures.  Review both wins and losses and document your strengths and weaknesses against each competitor who is active in your target market.  This section should be “fluid” too.  Management opportunity:  Role play competitive scenarios in sales meetings and one-on-ones.  Ensure your team members can deliver a credible response.
7. Demonstration Outline:  Define the best practices for successful demonstrations.  Key areas to focus on are messaging (the big picture), customization for the prospect, focus on specific relevant areas (avoid the feature dump!), customer stories for proof, wrap-up with restatement of key relevant messages or restatement of positive feedback received during the demonstration, and finally, “what did you think?”   Management opportunity:Role play the demonstrations in sales meetings, brainstorm new ideas as a team, and inspect for use in pre-call plans and live situations.
8. Winning Objection Handling:  Capture your most common objections with particular emphasis on the ones you like hearing the least.  Brainstorm the best responses and document for each.  Management opportunity:  Role plays and demonstrate use during live sales meetings.
9. Presentation Storyboard:  Capture your best talking points for your standard presentation(s).  If your Playbook is on-line, have a video of senior executives giving the presentation.  Management opportunity:  Practice as a team with brainstorming to keep the talking points and customer stories fresh.  As the manager, give the presentation in live sales meetings and gather feedback from your team afterword.

As you can see, properly done, this project requires a significant up-front investment in time and resources.  Many of the tasks can be divided and then reviewed in brainstorming sessions.  Once complete, you’ve built an extremely valuable sales tool and corporate asset. 

Additional Note:

Make sure your technical and finance resources have some input into the security of the content.  Disgruntled employees with access to this type of material can create damage.

Investing to Increase Sales Wins!

What if you could arm your sales executives with the right resources for each challenge posed by a customer/prospect or competitor?  What impact do you think having such a powerful “magic wand” would make on you or your team’s ability to win deals.  Conversely, how many deals do you think you might be able to rescue from the dreaded no decision?  One element of the formula is bringing the most relevant and impactful expertise, resources and materials to bear just as they are needed.  “Surviving in a Buyer’s World” outlines a great solution combining a knowledge management portal with effective sales coaching and leadership to produce a true weapon for your sales team.  The impact on sales productivity is potentially significant.  We all have seen the e-mails going around asking for a proposal, or competitive pricing information, or a slide.  What if it could be accessible in a moments notice at the client site?  What if there was a video of the VP of Product Mgmt. giving the pitch? Or a customer giving testimony to a successful deployment?  These types of nuggets can be the difference between winning and losing.  Why not have your best and brightest available anytime and anywhere?   As pointed out in the article, the key to success in such an initiative is to drive organizational commitment to developing and maintaining the arsenal and embedding it’s use in your sales process.

I believe in today’s environment, companies need to extend the tools and resources available to their sales teams further.  The negative external pressures on sales productivity may have never been greater and manifests itself in extended cycles and increased no decisions.  Tools that assist your sales team to increase there effectiveness and overall productivity should be actively considered as part of the success formula.   One such tool is a trigger event service.  At it simplest form, it could be setting up google alerts for news or events that signal a sales opportunity at a customer/prospect.  There are a number of services (g2, InsideView) that provide a more automated approach and include social networking capabilities to maximize a sales executive’s ability to be in the right place at the right time with a solution.

In conclusion, this is a time for investing in sales rep productivity to stem the tide of a challenging sales environment.  These investments will improve sales morale and demonstrate a commitment to their success.  Your organization will become much more market and customer focused as other organizations beyond sales take advantage of the intelligence created and deployed.

Analyze and Review the FRONT of the Pipeline…Why?

The vast majority of pipeline reviews or discussions focus on what’s closing this week, this month or this quarter.  Sales manager’s typically dig in to the details of the latest proposal and associated meetings, calls, and e-mails regarding the transition from proposed business, to a verbal agreement, to contract negotiation and signatures.  Sales executives maintain a similar focus on the “end game” as that is the pre-cursor to “pay day”.  I would not quibble with the notion that such analysis on this portion of the pipeline is important, but I believe it is also a two-edged sword.  Sales organizations that overweight analysis and focus on the bottom of the sales funnel risk erratic monthly or quarterly attainment.  If the sales team develops a group of prospects, moves them through the cycle, and then closes a percentage of  them, the result is that your have superior attainment in the months at the end of the sales cycle duration, and reduced attainment in the interim while the focus returns to the front of the pipeline. 

The best way to smooth out monthly attainment, either as an individual or a team, is to place a significant emphasis on how many new, qualified opportunities are entering the FRONT of the pipe ( top of the funnel) during the review interval.  If your typical sales cycle is 75-90 days, a percentage of the new, qualified opportunities entering the cycle in March are the business that’s closing in June.  If you or your team spends most of March closing January’s new opportunities, and the top of the funnel languishes, then you will have a good March, but a less than stellar May and June.

My contention is that a balanced review of the top, middle, and bottom of the pipeline funnel is the best practice to drive consistent overall performance.  This approach has other benefits including identifying and addressing opportunties that are “stuck” in the middle of the pipeline, as well as providing the sales leadership team immediate notice of a lack of qualified, new opportunities which will negatively impact future attainment.  In this manner, there will be some time to take action.

As my colleague, Dave Kurlan says “the sales pipeline is the single, most accurate predictor of future revenue”.  Let’s give equal time to the FRONT of the pipe!

Competitive Selling Fundamentals

I think we can agree that nearly all sales opportunities involve some level of threat from a competitor.  Many times that competitor is “no decision” which is extremely challenging, but a topic for another post.  When your competitor is a known alternative software solution, winning the deal demands flawless execution and attention to detail (which is what we strive for in every sales process).   Here are some rules, strategies and tactics to incorporate into your process.

1. Never disparage the competition directly.  On numerous occaisions, I have told a prospect that I am very comfortable discussing the benefits of my solution, and uncomfortable discussing my competitor’s solution, because I am far more knowledgable about my solution.  It’s important to take the high ground early.  That said, I have shared experiences from my customers who evaluated both my solution and a competitive one.  I believe it is important to keep such stories positive ie: “My customer really liked the way we handle _____ versus some of the other methods he/she reviewed”.  This is double-dipping by providing a customer reference and creating some FUD (fear, uncertainty, & doubt) about a competitor.  Enough on that.

2. Given that our mission is to successfully differentiate our solution, the process begins at the beginning.  Your initial and early interactions with the prospect have to feature intelligent questions, active listening, and on-going confirmations of the discussions.  This process builds not only credibility, but is the foundation for the business relationship.  Intuitive and insightful questions exploring the business problem, followed by confirmations of the discussions, create a vision for the solution, as well as trust, clarity and alignment.

If it isn’t already apparent or discussed, one of your questions should be about competitors.  This could take the form of a question about the evaluation process.  My strategy is to be nonchalant and simply ask directly what other solutions are being evaluated.  Often times I know my counterpart(s) on the competing team and weave that into the conversation as a means of displaying confidence and reducing any tension, perceived or otherwise.

3.  It’s not all high level vision and alignment though to gain a competitive advantage.  As sales professionals we still have to ensure there is pain, and equally importantly there is a compelling event or reason to buy, and budget.  We need to identify the buyer and confirm they care and the project or initiative is on the near term radar screen.  Once the buyer is identified, it is important to do some research (LinkedIn or other social networking sites)  for two reasons.  First,  you want to know who they know or who you know who may be an asset, and secondly, to identify potential relationships your competitor(s) have which could impact the decision adversely.

4.  Much of what we learned and confirmed earlier will find it’s way into your proposal.  View your proposal as the “silent salesperson” who provides written testimony of the key discussions you have had.  This includes a crisp, accurate description of the current situation (pain/compelling event), description of the agreed upon solution, your qualifications to deliver the solution (relevant customer success stories), pricing proposal, and business terms.  It is important that the proposal include everything that’s been discussed and agreed to.  Someone who is not familiar with your process should be able to read your proposal and understand exactly what is proposed, why, and how.  It is very likely that some unidentified executive may read your proposal (the “silent sales person”) and have influence over the decision. The proposal is the last line of defense against negative competitive or unforeseen influence within your prospect.

5. In a perfect world, you would have won the deal prior to presenting your proposal.  In the event that’s not the case, it is important to strive for a meeting to present your proposal.   I know some who refuse to submit a proposal unless they have an opportunity to present it.  Your meeting allows you to give a final review and confirmation of the business case for your solution, to ASK FOR THE ORDER,  and to confirm the decision process and time-lines.  If there is an unresolved competitive issue, it will appear at this session.  It may be wise to have resources available to help you overcome a last minute challenge.

In closing, I will relate a story whereby my sales team had gone through this process from A-Z and we were in a dead-heat tie with our most feared competitor.  We ended up winning because we had a better relationship, and had built trust.  The buyer approached me in the 11th hour and explained how their budget cycle released monies at different times throughout the year.  She told me she had the money for the total amount (low 6 figures) and could get a waiver to release it all at once, but that if we could modify our billing terms to align with her budget, she would sign the deal immediately.  I sold the deal to our CFO and we won.  Our competitor was never given the opportunity. 

Good luck!

Pre-call planning is essential!

Top sales executives are committed to employing  pre-call planning as the foundation for a successful meeting with a senior executive.  The mission of your meeting is to ensure a continued sales process (assuming your meeting is with a fully qualified prospect).  The mission of the pre-call planning process is to ensure a successful meeting.  To that end, establishing your personal and company value through intelligent questioning, effective objection handling, and reducing or eliminating the feeling of risk for your prospect is essential.   Mary Donato has penned a short but powerful description of a pre-call plan process in a recent Sales and Marketing Management article that I recommend.

Strategy for the New Reality in Account Management

So we all agree that these are challenging times for everyone, strategic sales professionals as well as their customers and prospects.  So what?  I believe the “what” is a focus and dedication to sales and account management execution.

First, it is crucial to play defense with your key customers.  As we all know, the best defense can be a good offense.  Many of your best customers will be approached by competitors with low price offers to switch.  Here’s a plan to ensure your customers rebuff such overtures.

Gather your account team (Sales Manager, Support, Inside Sales, sponsoring executive etc.) and build out a 2009 Account Plan.  This plan should include monthly activities and initiatives at a minimum.  The theme behind these activities is proactive communications and value add, and serve to keep you as close as possible to your customer.  These activities could be additional training for key users or groups, “lunch & learn” presentations, executive briefings and the like.  Your planned activities should be enhanced with regularly scheduled update calls to key sponsors and executives from the appropriate corresponding executives on your team.  For example, the sales executive calls the key users and influencers bi-weekly.  The sales manager joins that call monthly.  Your VP Sales should call the executive sponsor bi-monthly.  This level of communication in concert with value-added activities will prevent or mitigate any unpleasant surprises. 

Once you have built a draft plan for the year, share the process with your customer!  Engage them in the mission to add value to the relationship.  I recommend including tasks or initiatives for them to execute which will drive momentum and good will.  Ask them to introduce your team to new groups or other divisions or subsidiaries.  Ask them to participate in product planning sessions with your engineering team.  Ask them to speak at a sales meeting or a management team meeting.  Build in a process for creation and delivery of a published customer profile/success story.  The successful engagement of your customer in the 2009 Account Plan will significantly enhance your ability to maintain and grow the relationship.

The final step is to create and share the Account Plan working document with your customer.  This is best done in a face-to-face working session if possible.  Include as much detail and timeline information as you can.  I recommend incorporating the Account Plan into your CRM to ensure visibility for all internal team members.  Make sure the activities are in everyone on your team’s calenders.  Now, you are ready for the successful execution of your Account Plan.

Good luck!

End of Qtr/Year Price Objection

It’s happened to most of us in the enterprise software sales marketplace.  You’re in the final review meeting.  Your proposal has been verbally agreed to, and your prospect pulls out the “higher authority” objection mentioning that the CFO or someone wants/needs a price concession.  Your commission statement flashes before your eyes (without this deal!).  The poker game begins.

Strategic sales excellence dictates that you calmly address the objection directly with questions to expose the issue.  For this example, we will assume it is purely a gambit to get a better deal.  I have used different combinations of the following with good results.

In any case, it is time to review the key value points your solution will deliver and quantify the pain that will be addressed.  It is important, during this review,  to gain agreement throughout the discussion on each point.  If you don’t, you haven’t finished selling, and you have missed something in your process.

Now the fun starts.  If you are extremely confident, you can employ a soft version of the “take-away” close which goes something like:

“Bill, I’m sorry we seem to be on different planes, here.  Based on the value we provide which addresses your issues at the price we discussed, I expected we would proceed as planned.  I can only wonder if perhaps our solution isn’t the right one for you.  What do you think?”  He who speaks next loses.  “Bill” won’t concede at this point, but you have shifted the negotiations to a different level, and taken a much more powerful position from which to negotiate a settlement.

Another approach for those of us in the SaaS/subscription world, is to suggest a compromise.  Consider offering to extend the subscription by one month, in return for accelerated payment terms. You need to get something in return for the implicit discount of the 13 month subscription and full price on accelerated terms makes the finance department happy. 

One final approach, and the one I like the least, is to agree to a lower price in return for a reduction in services.  This approach puts the long term relationship at risk because your solution may not be used in an optimal way, and the overall value may be compromised. 

What’s your favorite/most successful approach?

Strategic Sales Methodology

Managing complex, multi-level solution sales for large corporate accounts requires strategic sales excellence particularly if they involve emerging technologies. Key elements in the process are building relationships and credibility within the account(s) that allow the sales team to “earn the right” to engage in a sales process, while at the same time qualifying the opportunity. I have found that understanding the prospects vision for the solution, and their personal and professional “win” in implementing the solution, provides a solid roadmap to success. Listening skills, empathy, and the ability to qualify, understand and confirm the prospect’s pain points are the foundation for ultimate differentiation from competing alternatives. Once established as a “trusted advisor”, discerning the real issues and marshalling key resources to address those issues for all stakeholders builds sales momentum towards the close. If the aforementioned process is managed and executed properly, collaborating with the prospect stakeholders on the proposal, and negotiating a mutually beneficial agreement is a natural conclusion to the sales process versus a contentious and/or uncomfortable one. Strategic selling today can be optimized by eliminating as much risk as possible from the sales process for the prospect. True strategic sales professionals successfully guide their sales processes by keeping the objectives well-defined, and the aspirations, and politics of their prospects clear. In this way, they avoid multiple mid-course corrections resulting in extended or failed sales cycles.