Sales Process Blog

Filling Your Sales Pipeline

 

Image via Victor Habbick/freedigitalphotos.net

So, here’s a test for all the petrol-heads, and speed merchants out there.You’re in a car at the start of a bridge that’s two miles long. You’re in a race and you’ve been given a target time of two minutes to drive the length of the bridge. You’re thinking, “That’s not too hard, it’s just an average of 60mph, I can do that”, and you turn the key in the ignition and off you set. No plan needed -- just go.

But there’s some traffic on the bridge, and you only average 30mph for the first mile. Now, you’ve a bit of a challenge. But you can still do it, right?

So, what speed do you need to do over the second half of the bridge to average 60mph over the trip?

The answer is coming up shortly … but before I tell you the answer (you probably got it right anyway), I’d like to draw a parallel with the task you have of hitting your sales target -- consistently.

Unless you’ve enough opportunities in your pipeline, you’re always going to be under real pressure to get to your destination in time. And it’s not just about volume of deals, it’s equally about steady pipeline velocity.

Remember, you had to average 60mph over the two mile stretch, and you only averaged 30mph for the first mile.

The most common answers to this puzzle are (1) 90mph and (2) 120mph. The correct answer of course is that, unless you can perform a miracle, it can’t be done. The 30mph average for the first mile has already taken up two minutes, and that’s all the time you had if you were to average 60mph over the two-mile span of the bridge.

And so it is with hitting your numbers without a full pipeline. It calls for a miracle, and that’s not something you should count on.

Donal Daly is CEO of The TAS Group. 

 

The Impact of Social Networks on Sales Pipeline Management

I conducted a survey on LinkedIn a few years back to determine what sellers view as their biggest problem at the moment. The result was pretty definitive. It’s all about the pipeline, baby!

I’ve updated this post to reflect the impact of social networks -- there are 13 rules!

At the end of this post –- after the 13 rules –- I include a graphic of the Dealmaker Pipeline Snapshot, that we use here at The TAS Group, and with many of our customers, to effectively manage the sales pipeline.

1. Maintaining a strong sales pipeline, with enough qualified opportunities at each phase in the pipeline, is the only way to avoid the quarter-end crunch.
2. Pipeline velocity is a lot more important that pipeline volume.
3. Your pipeline is a better predictor of the medium and long-term health of your business than your sales forecast –- and they are two very different indicators.
4. Having too many stages in the pipeline is counter-productive. Six is the optimum number of stages in the pipeline.
5. It is futile to determine the value of a pipeline by multiplying the value of each opportunity by the probability of it closing. You rarely get a percentage of a deal.
6. You can’t depend solely on marketing to fill the funnel. You must generate your own leads. If you don’t look constantly for new opportunities, you lose control over your destiny.
7. A healthy pipeline will have the right blend of deals, in terms of size. If you want to fill a barrel with rocks and maximize the usage of the capacity of the barrel, you have to fill the gaps between the rocks with stones or pebbles. It’s the same with your pipeline.
8. Pipeline stages have no inherent value in terms of deal progression. It’s only the customer related actions tied to each stage that gives meaning to the progression of deals through the pipeline. Clear deliverables (based on evidence of customer actions) must be linked to each stage.
9. You need an algorithmic measure for each stage of the pipeline to determine whether you have enough opportunities at each stage. Consider the time to close, the probability of closure, and the target revenue to calculate the value you need.
10. Deals that are inactive (have not been worked on for more than 60 days) should be cleared out of the sales funnel and sent back to marketing. Otherwise you’re given a false sense of the value of your sales pipeline.
11. Customers (or prospects) are entering the sales cycle further down the funnel now as they are using social networks to research solutions before they invite salespeople into the conversation.
12. Unless you’ve established yourself as part of the "recommendation chain" many of these opportunities will never enter your funnel, they will be closed by someone else before you even know about it.
13. Networking has always been the best way to fill the funnel – now with social networks you can use OPM (Other People’s Money) to generate buyers –- not just opportunities.

Donal Daly is CEO of The TAS Group. 

 

A Sales Negotiation Story (Interests vs. Positions)

By Donal Daly

Image via http://www.thejfblogit.co.uk/

In any negotation, you never want to confuse interests with positions. 

A position is a particular stance taken by one party in a negotiation. It typically outlines that person's preferred result.

Interests, on the other hand, are the reasons behind the position. Interests define the problem. They are based on intangible motivations such as need, desires, or concerns, which underlie the preferred solution. It is important that you distinguish between interests and positions. Your interests in a negotiation are whatever you care about that is at stake in the process.

A "Complete Negotiator" is clear on his or her ultimate interests, and those of the other side. They also know their trade-offs among lesser interests, and are remarkably flexible and creative on the means. Consider the following negotiation story as an example. 

Simon is a sales executive in a software company that provides sales management solutions to the life assurance industry. A typical sale for Simon comprises a software license fee of $80,000, with an additional annual maintenance and support charge of $20,000, for a total purchase price of $100,000. Having competed effectively in a bid to a large insurance company, Simon was the preferred supplier. When it came to the negotiation, the buyer informed Simon that he needed him to sharpen his pencil a little, as he was only prepared to pay $75,000 in total. Simon was surprised, and a little dejected. He couldn’t sell the software without maintenance, and there wasn’t any way he could provide a full 25% discount. He tried everything to raise the buyer’s offer. He offered free additional training programs to the buyer. He suggested that, if he could hold his price, he could add a second year’s maintenance at a reduced rate. He even offered a dedicated support agent, just for that customer. It was all to no avail. The customer held firm, stating that he could only pay $75,000. Simon was confused. This customer had been reasonable to deal with right through the selling cycle. He provided information as requested and gave honest feedback on issues and progress. Simon felt he was at an impasse. The customer wouldn’t move from his $75,000 number –- not one dollar. Finally, Simon just asked the customer, “What’s magic about $75,000?”

The customer’s response opened the door to a solution. “It’s all I have left in this year’s budget.”

Though Simon had checked budget availability earlier in the selling cycle, a small project had been approved that took $50,000 from his buyer’s coffers, leaving him with only $75,000. That left him $25,000 short, if he agreed to Simon’s number. The buyer’s issue wasn’t value or price. It was that year’s budget. His position stated that all he was prepared to pay was $75,000, while his interest, once uncovered, revealed that $75,000 was all he was prepared to pay in that financial year.

Simon solved the problem by selling him a two-year maintenance contract, and agreeing a payment schedule that met his customer’s requirements. “Can you commit to a two-year support deal, if I structure the payment schedule such that you only have to pay $75,000 this year?”

"Complete Negotiators" probe beyond combative positions to uncover the shared interests that lie beneath. Arguing over positions is inefficient, and frequently damages the relationship between the seller and the buyer. Too much emphasis on positions drives negotiation toward a risky, ritual dance that does not meet either party’s fundamental concerns. Learning about and reconciling the full set of interests requires patience, researching the other side, asking many questions, and really listening. When you shift the discussions from positions to interests, the path to resolution becomes clearer. When you focus on the buyer’s interests, you can get to the heart of the matter more quickly, promote mutual understanding, and accelerate the search for a creative solution.

Donal Daly is CEO of The TAS Group. 

Measuring the True Health of Your Sales Pipeline

by Donal Daly

If you’re interested in knowing how to determine the actual value of your sales pipeline, this post is worth a read.

In a previous post, I set out what I consider to be the important elements of a sales pipeline management system. That’s all about knowing how much you need to have in your pipeline to achieve your revenue target. Clearly, if you don’t have enough opportunities in the sales pipeline, you won’t make your revenue target. Using a measure we call the Pipeline Value Factor, you can calculate the value, number, and spread of deals that you need – but that’s still not enough. The health of your sales pipeline is a function of the momentum, age, activity, and velocity of opportunities.

Most pipeline reports measure only the pipeline value or volume, by adding up the value of each opportunity in each stage and coming up with a total pipeline value. Unless those deals are being actively worked, however, the pipeline report is likely giving you an inaccurate, or at least incomplete, view.

When we’re measuring the true worth of a pipeline, we consider the status of each deal at each stage in the funnel. We classify each deal as active, stalled, or inactive. Depending on the sales cycle and the overall cadence of the business, the status is determined by when the deal was last worked. If, for example, your sales cycle is 90 days, it would be reasonable to assume that a deal that has not been worked in more than 60 days is inactive. If the salesperson has placed that deal at one of the later stages in the pipeline, then clearly there is a misrepresentation of the value of that stage in the funnel. We know that opportunities never stand still; either they move forward toward closure or regress toward no decision or loss.

So how do we do this?  We use one of the pipeline analytics reports in the Performance Coach module of Dealmaker – our Sales Performance Automation platform.

In the graphic below, you can see that the salesperson, Lynne Clooney, has a total pipeline value of $11,499,800, the number represented in the bottom right corner. When you look closer, you also see that only $5,980,000 is active, $3,670,000 is stalled, and $1,849,800 is inactive. In this report, stalled deals are those that have not been worked in more than 30 days, and inactive deals have not been worked in more than 60 days.

On the face of it, Lynne’s pipeline isn’t bad. We know that she has a quota of $2.5 million, and with nearly five times that in the funnel, you could be forgiven for thinking that she’s in good shape; however, the sales cycle at Lynne’s company is 90 days, and we can tell from this report that there is nearly $5 million in her pipeline that she has not worked in the last 30 days. Should I be concerned about that?

More critical is that, of the $1.8 million that’s recorded as inactive, there are deals worth $320,000 in verbal order and $240,000 in acquisition. As these are the last two stages of the funnel, we might expect them to close soon – but that’s surely not going to happen if they’re not being worked. It’s time to review the plan or determine if, in fact, we’ve lost the deals and they should be removed from the funnel.

Getting this kind of insight provides considerable actionable data to help the salesperson. If deals are inactive, it frequently points to a lack of urgency on the customer’s part, or the salesperson’s inability to identify or create a compelling event when she can demonstrate to the customer the value of making a decision now. In either case, it should point to an opportunity for Lynne’s sales manager or marketing department to create an initiative or program to help move the deals. In other cases, it just highlights that the salesperson has not recorded sales as lost or disqualified – but then everyone is working on an assumption that she has enough in her pipeline, and that is not good for anyone.

When deals are stalled, our experience tells us that there is some obstacle that is causing difficulty for the salesperson. This is when the sales managers should prove their worth. It’s time to coach or brainstorm to figure out how to apply the resources of the organization to help the salesperson.

 

Today's post is by Donal Daly, CEO of The TAS Group. 

Confronting Sales Failures: How to Talk about Lost Deals

 

Image courtesy freedigitalphotos.net/David Castillo Dominici

 

by Donal Daly

When he was just 16, Jackson Browne wrote and recorded a song called These Days. One of the lines is,“Don’t confront me with my failures, I have not forgotten them.” 

I thought of this line when I heard the following conversation between a sales manager and a rep.

MANAGER: You lost the deal!

SALES REP: Yes, I know.

MANAGER: You’re behind quota!

SALES REP: Yes, I know.

MANAGER: I can’t believe you lost the deal!

SALES REP: Suspending belief doesn’t help.

Manager: You’re a failure!

SALES REP: I quit.

Unfortunately, this conversation (or something similar) happens too frequently. Aside from the personalities involved, and the obvious absence of any semblance of mutual respect, this kind of conversation happens for one main reason. The only data the sales manager has is historical. He lives every day trying to predict the future based solely on lagging indicators, so the only conversation he can have with the sales person is a conversation too late. If the deal was lost, the sales manager can only confront the salesperson with his failures –- and, as we see from the conversation above, that doesn't do much good.

But what if the sales manager had access to leading indicators and not just lagging indicators? What if he could look inside the salesperson’s pipeline and understand the true pipeline velocity, not just the number, or size, or the deals?  What if he had intelligent insight into the health of each deal?  Would it help if he could gain foresight from automated analysis of past trends, usual sales cycles, typical deal-blockers, and areas of risk?  Of course it would.

But wait -- wouldn’t it be better if reps could do that for themselves? Imagine if the tools existed whereby the salesperson could self-manage, in a world where a system provided true benefit for him or her, and transcended the "I’ve go to enter this data for management" paradigm. Then you would see uncommon productivity. The end of weekly sales calls as we know them. No more “Can you tell me what you did this week on the ACME opportunity?”; no more confronting the salesperson with his or her failures; but instead a conversation that’s productive. A conversation that goes “I can see we’re running in to a possible problem with that deal -- here’s how I think I might be able to help, based on what I’ve seen work in other deals.” That’s when a sales manager can become a sales leader.

While there is no technological prosthetic for broken a relationship between a sales manager and his or her team, the latter scenario I described is absolutely possible today, and is being deployed in many of the world’s leading sales organizations, using Sales 2.0 technology. Tools exist to intelligently analyze deals, evaluate pipeline velocity, examine sales process progress, and automatically predict deal close probability and sales cycle, and all without onerous data entry or unreasonable additional work.

Now, I’m totally biased on this topic (The TAS Group provides Sales 2.0 tools), but there’s very little that’s more demotivating than being confronted with your failures, particularly when no assistance or advice is offered. Sales velocity is fueled by confidence, and anything that undermines that confidence is destructive. The tools, methodologies, and systems are available today to increase that velocity, and unless you consider how to apply them in your business, you will lag behind.

Incidentally, Jackson Browne, along with James Taylor, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and The Eagles, was managed by David Geffen, who founded Asylum Records. Geffen subsequently joined Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg to form Dreamworks SKG (remember Shrek?).

Geffen never signed a contract with any of his acts, and, according to him, none of them ever left him.  He said his role was to be a buffer between his artists and the maelstrom of the music industry, and to help the musicians in every way he could, so that the artist could perform. Sounds like a good model for a sales leader to me.

Donal Daly is CEO of The TAS Group. 

Blueprint for Sales & Marketing Alignment: Part 1

by Donal Daly

 

Image via FreeDigitalPhotos.net/SalvatoreVuono

Few distinct viewpoints in business are as polarized as those of marketing and sales professionals. Marketing is glamorous, sales less so. Sales are measurable, marketing less so. The uneasy relationship between sales and marketing is widespread and infects almost all types of businesses, particularly technology companies that provide high-value solutions to large corporations. Marketing folks decry the poor sales conversion rate delivered by the sales team, who in turn abhor what they would characterize as the laughable value delivered by expensive marketing campaigns.

 

I’ve met with many sales and marketing professionals, and the polarity of perspective is striking. “Salespeople are just quick-talking, quota-driven snake oil dealers” was the opinion of the marketing quarter, while the sales constituency responded, “Sales teams draw the picture, and marketing teams color it in!”

Like many opposing forces, however, their true interdependence is understated and sometimes unclear. The strategic marketing function (not marketing communications) believes that it sets out the game plan, sometimes only to find that there are no players who understand the strategy. Sales teams execute plays, without understanding where the corporate goal is. On today’s playing field, successful selling and the leading sales professional encapsulate the best of strategic marketing, but at an individual customer level. Today’s sales winners leave behind their previous role as vehicles for value communication and take responsibility for value creation, delivered to carefully chosen prospects – to convert them to customers.

Principles, once seemingly engraved in stone, now reveal themselves to be more fluid than rigid. In a world where value creation is a necessity, and the foundation upon which profitable sales relationships are built, activity alone no longer suffices. The old adage of “sales is a numbers game” rings hollow in a world where information is everywhere, and customers are frequently as knowledgeable as you are about your products, and those of your competitor. Unless you create – rather than just communicate – value, customers will look elsewhere. Professional selling has evolved beyond a “Go get ‘em, Tiger!” approach, and a good listener will beat a fast talker every time. Customers now look to a sales professional to be their partner in developing a future vision for their organizations. They expect actions -- not just words. The winning professional salesperson is becoming a customer confidante, a trusted advisor in his industry, and the person who leads his colleagues to President’s Club, year after year.

Bringing Sales and Marketing Together

For sales and marketing to work together, there must be a

• common framework,
• blueprint of the deal,
• shared perspective of the ideal customer, and
• single understanding of typical problems the customer is trying to solve.

The function of any such blueprint should be to equip anyone selling or marketing high value, complex products to large corporations with a defined process that can be molded to an individual salesperson’s style but which also takes much of the uncertainty out of the sales process. I tried to do that here. It combines high-level, strategic marketing principles to draw the map, with focused tactics to complete each journey, addressing the practical stops along the way.

Its purpose is to help you grow revenue. We have all spent too many hours in airports, traveling to sales calls, to focus on anything else. Selling is an honorable profession -- and a tough one. Marketing is no less honorable, but is absent the rejections in sales that are many and varied, or the highs which are sometimes not as frequent as the lows. But when sales is good, when you close that big deal, or win a really competitive bid, there is almost nothing to compare. If we can construct an environment where sales and marketing are fellow travelers on this journey, sharing the same map, and headed to the same destination, it is more likely that the destination reached will be a treasured one.

I have set out here a defined, repeatable sales process that is pragmatic and usable. It is focused around the sales process and highlights what the sales person needs to do, and how the marketing organization might think about how to support the sales process, each step of the way. The process sets out key principles, and arranges them into these six manageable, actionable steps -- a framework that you can adopt to aid your efforts. 

1. Select target customer.
2. Understand buyer need.
3. Qualify the ppportunity.
4. Plan and manage the pipeline.
5. Execute the sales plan.
6. Negotiate and close.

In following posts, I will go into detail on each of these steps in the sales process, outlining the respective and interdependent tasks for sales and marketing. But, in the meantime, if you want to create a customized sales process for your own company, you can do so for free at DealmakerGenius.

Donal Daly is CEO of The TAS Group.

Why You Really Lost the Sale: Part 2

Last week reviewed the reasons sales managers and salespeople most often give for losing the sale.

No matter how you look at those reasons, in truth there are really only two reasons you lose a sale:

1. You should not have been pursuing the deal in the first place, or
2. You were outsold.

It’s as simple as that. In my experience, failure is weighted fairly evenly across both. Today, let's look at reason number one in more detail. 

Reason 1: You should not have been pursuing the deal in the first place.

At The TAS Group, we discuss ways to help sales teams win four out of seven deals, instead of three out of 10. 

This means that you pursue fewer opportunities. It’s not about getting up to bat more often; in fact it’s the opposite. In practice, it means determining at the outset if your solution can uniquely and competitively add value to the specific customer that you are targeting.

Of course, this approach means research, and work, and understanding what the customer wants to achieve, and how your solution might be applied to solve their specific problem. This information is only useful if you understand what the competitor might be offering. Often, it’s as simple as defining your sweet-spot customer –- listing the attributes that describe the profile of the customer for whom you can competitively add value. When you hear yourself saying “We haven't sold to this type of customer before, but I think I can make it work,” then move on. You’re wasting your time.

Bottom line: If you are a sales manager or salesperson and you say any of the following after you lose the deal, you never should have been there in the first place.

1. “The customer is locked into our competitor.”
2. “Our solution just wasn’t a good fit, and the rep tried to squeeze a round peg into a square hole.”
3. “The customer never told me that capability X was important.”
4. “We couldn’t provide a reference because we’ve never sold to that type of customer before.”
5. “The rep never knew that the competitor wrote the RFP.” 

Now let’s examine the second reason deals are lost.

Reason 2: You were outsold.

Sometimes this is hard to accept. Personally, if I can’t make the case that I didn’t belong there in the first place, then I’ve been outsold. That means any of the following were true:

• I didn’t understand what the customer wanted to achieve,
• I was not politically aligned in the customer’s organization,
• I didn’t understand the customer’s buying process, 
•  chose the wrong competitive strategy, 
• I failed to articulate my value proposition in terms that the customer understood, 
• I failed to demonstrate ROI for my solution, or (more likely), 
• a combination of a few of these.

Bottom line: If you are a sales manager or salesperson and you say any of the following after you lose the deal, you never should have been there in the first place.

1. “Well, the rep wasn’t speaking to the decision maker.”
2. “The rep didn’t understand what the customer really wanted to achieve.”
3. “The competitor had a stronger relationship with the customer.”
4. “We didn’t understand the personal motivation of the decision maker.”
5. “The rep couldn’t get the customer to understand our value proposition.”
6. “The rep never realized that the budget was way too small for our product.”
7. “We’re just too expensive.”
8. “The rep never knew [the deal] had to be approved the technology committee. The customer never said that.”
9. “The customer just doesn’t get it. I don’t understand it –- she really needs our stuff.”
10. “The customer never told me that capability X was important.”
11. “My [internal] sponsor just didn’t have the juice to make it happen –- even though he told me he did.”

Now, even if you’ve done a great job in qualification –- and if you're passing the should-I-be-there-in-the-first-place test -- you still won’t win all of the deals.  Sometimes, you will be outsold, but the good news is that 3 out of 4 is still a realistic sales win rate target.

When I express the perspective outlined here, I get a range of reactions, ranging from animosity (“Who does he think he is? He doesn’t understand what I go through to win a deal”) to guarded acceptance and excitement (“Wow, if we could actually achieve that, it would be incredible. We should give it a shot”).

As we’ve watched our customers move to these kind of ratios, it’s been really gratifying to know that we’re making that kind of difference for some. I’ve spoken at length to those who excel on this journey, and there are a number of common attributes –- some organizational, and some with respect to the tools they use to help them. 

Organizationally, the companies just seem to be run better, and sales is viewed as the engine that fuels growth. As a result, the investment is commensurate. From a sales tools perspective, the common elements are a sales process that maps to how the customer buys, a deep analysis of the customer’s political structure, and collaborative interaction with the customer to truly understand the business problem and goals.

Why You Really Lost the Sale (Part 1)

Today's blog is by Donal Daly, CEO of The TAS Group.

Image via coulorbox.info

One of the issues that I’m often asked about is how to improve sales win rate. Sometimes the question is presented as “What’s a good win rate?" or “What percentage of deals that I bid for should I win?” 

Of course there is really no universal answer to this question –- and the reason for that is that it’s the wrong question.

In my opinion, energy is more productively spent in determining why you lose deals, and, in my experience, the explanation follows a fairly predictable pattern. If that is true, then if you can identify the common attributes of lost deals, you can work to avoid deals with those attributes, or focus on how to overcome the weaknesses that gave rise to the failure. Then by definition, your win rate will improve.

Here are the reasons sales managers give when I ask why their teams lost the deal:

1. “Well, he wasn’t speaking to the decision maker.”
2. “She didn’t understand what the customer really wanted to achieve.”
3. “We should never have bid in the first place. The customer is locked into our competitor.”
4. “Our solution just wasn’t a good fit, and he (the salesperson) tried to squeeze a round peg into a square hole.”
5. “The competitor had a stronger relationship with the customer.”
6. “There was never a project there in the first place.”
7. “We didn’t understand the personal motivation of the decision maker.”
8. “He couldn’t get the customer to understand our value proposition.”
9. “She never realized that the budget was way too small for our product.”

Responses from salespeople to the same question include many of the above, but they sometimes give additional reasons:

1. “We’re just too expensive.”
2. “We couldn’t provide a reference because we’ve never sold to that type of customer before.”
3. “I never knew [the deal] had to be approved the technology committee. He never told me that.”
4. “The customer just doesn’t get it. I don’t understand it –- she really needs our stuff.”
5. “I never knew that the competitor wrote the RFP.”
6. “He never told me that capability X was important.”
7. “My [internal] sponsor just didn’t have the juice to make it happen –- even though he told me he did.”

For mid-to-large deals in an enterprise B2B market, the costs incurred in pursuing a sale will typically range between $10,000 and $100,000. Our research at The TAS Group has shown that it takes 50% longer on average to lose a deal than to win one. Think about that for a moment. If your sales team is spending more time losing deals than winning deals, what’s that going to do to your quota achievement? Or, if you could fix the problem, what impact would that have?

Next week, we'll look at the two real reasons sales are lost, and how you can strategize to improve your win rates.  

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Avoid Errors, Improve Results: Make a List, Check It Twice

Today's blog is by Donal Daly, CEO of The TAS Group.

 

In his recent book, The Checklist Manifesto, Dr. Atul Gawande says, “The volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.” Gawande’s proposition that a checklist can dramatically improve this situation is supported by numerous examples:

• In 2001, Dr. Peter Pronovost at John Hopkins devised his own operating-room checklist and reduced the rate of infections related to IV tubes from 11 percent to zero.
• Gawande shows that when Captain Sullenberger famously landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River with no loss of life, Sullenberger and his co-pilot followed a detailed emergency checklist that multiplied his chances of pulling it off.
• In 1935, Boeing’s B-17 crashed on its first test flight because it was too complex to operate. The pilots came up with a checklist and then went on to fly 1.8 million miles without an accident. The Army ultimately ordered 13,000 B-17s – and the pilot checklist became universal.

According to The Checklist Manifesto, here’s the perfect checklist for making a checklist:

1. Include all “stupid but critical” tasks so they are not overlooked.
2. Make it mandatory for team members to know when they complete one of the tasks.
3. Empower subordinates to question their superiors about the checklist.
4. Allow for improvisation in unusual circumstances.
5. Thoroughly test-drive your checklist before putting it into practice.

Sounds to me like a good, simple recipe for sales process or methodology. What do you think?

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What Process Do You Use When Buyers Go Bad?

Today's blog is by Donal Daly, CEO of The TAS Group.

 

We all know that some buyers are not always fair in their dealings, especially when it comes to getting you to cave on price. I guarantee that you will laugh out loud at the video below.

I got this link from my friend Joe Terry over at Corporate Visions, whose organization helps companies create a compelling message to set themselves apart in the market. One thing that they do that I think really has value is that they know how to [help companies] deliver the right marketing messages at the right place in the sales cycle.

This video shows some examples of [bad] corporate-buyer behavior, but in a consumer context. I particularly like the scene in which a lady is trying to negotiate getting highlights in her hair for free. When confronted with the stylist who (understandably) is not keen to work for free, she concedes, “OK, but I will cover your hard costs only.” Now, where have we heard that before?

Joe Goes on to Say…

We’re almost so used to B2B purchasing demands that we forget how ridiculous they are. This video gives us a chance to step back and laugh, but it doesn’t change the reality of your customers’ buying habits. What can you do? Do these battles always have to occur? According to The Corporate Executive Board’s Integrated Sales Executive Council, only 9 percent of brand preference and loyalty decisions are based on price.

Meanwhile, 53 percent of a prospect’s decision to choose you comes from his or her sales experience.

So You’re Saying I’ve Got a Chance

What these percentages mean is, in a world where everyone sounds and looks the same, your prospects and customers are saying, “Would someone please cut through the clutter and present a clear path to value that will result if I partner with your company?” Unfortunately, too many salespeople wallow in parity with their presentations and proposals, leaving customers with the perception that everyone is a commodity – and freeing them up to bring the hammer of B2B purchasing down. Avoid these ugly and ridiculous confrontations by preemptively showing the contrast between you and your prospect’s status quo, as well as between you and your competition.  

Value Lives in the Contrast between Pain and Gain  

Here are three easy ways you can use contrast to show value:

1) Focus on what you do that’s unique: Don’t waste precious conversation time playing the “me, too” game. If you’re in a job interview, would you talk about how your resume is exactly the same as the one the guy who interviewed before you presented?  Of course not! Your prospect already knows that your solution is on par with others in the industry, that’s why he or she agreed to talk with you in the first place. Instead, identify some unmet or underserved customer pain, and talk about what you do uniquely or better to turn that pain into gain.

2) Tell before-and-after stories: When presenting references, don’t show off just the end results your customers realized after using your solution. That’s only half the story. You need to show contrast. What was your customer’s life like before implementing your solution, and then after? Showcasing the pain first provides the foundation for understanding what value your solution brings by helping customers visualize their current situation and see it getting better.

3) Use colors and space to make emotional connections: Don’t stop with the content of your message. Make sure the way you deliver your uniqueness and value is engaging and memorable. Work the room… or the Web conference. Remember, value lies in the contrast between the pain and the gain, so make the contrast as apparent as possible. Use different flip charts placed at opposite sides of the room, or split your PowerPoint slide in two to show the pain and the gain. And use different colored markers or different colored fonts. Use red for bad and green or black for good in Western cultures. (Adjust the colors based on what significance they carry in your culture.)

Don’t fall for the same old B2B buying tactics. Establish your solution as the one your prospects need by leading with your uniqueness, clearly showing the contrast between you, the status quo, and your competition, and proving it with a before-and-after customer story that makes your value come alive.

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