CHAPTER 28

Practicing Value-Based Persistence

Anyone who has ever sold for a living has encountered the following situation. You’re talking for the first time to Larry, a decision maker at ACME Tech, a company that you feel could potentially be a fit for your product or service. But before you get two words out of your mouth, Larry shuts you down with either:

   “We already have a supplier,” or

   “We’re not in the market right now,” or

   “We’re not interested.”

Or perhaps all three. Many sales leaders would have you believe that this response is merely an objection that can be overcome with the appropriate salesmanship. Not interested? No problem. Not in the market? No problem. Already have a supplier? No problem. Just sell harder.

Well, actually, there is a problem: the reluctance of salespeople to walk away from a potential sales opportunity. Statements of disinterest from customers are usually statements of fact, not objections. There are always exceptions to the rule, but in general people mean what they say.

In my consulting and speaking work, salespeople frequently ask me, “What should I do when people say they’re not interested?” For my response, I harken back to my first boss in sales, Ray. He had the best and simplest answer to this question: “Go find someone who is.”

We live and sell in a big world. There are lots of potential customers out there. Many will find you. Some you’ll have to go find. Those who you find will be in varying states of readiness. Most won’t be worth waiting for. Some will be, but they will have to be cultivated.

In those cases, you have to exercise some persistence. Persistence is a valuable characteristic to have when you’re a salesperson. Persistence is about refusing to give up even in the face of adversity. And, as we all know, there can be a lot of adversity in selling. But persistence in itself has no value to your customers or to you. It must be applied correctly. Otherwise it can be perceived as annoying and time-wasting by your prospects, thereby dooming any chance you have to earn their trust and their business in the future.

The key is to learn how to be persistent without being a pest.

For that I recommend a process called Value-Based Persistence (VBP). Value-Based Persistence is a process any seller can use to effectively follow up and stay in touch with a customer until the timeframe for your sales cycle and her buying cycle are in alignment. Essentially, VBP is a form of scheduled responsiveness. It’s the methodical delivery of carefully curated content over a defined period of time that is designed to move the potential customer to engage in a buying process.

It’s important to know when to implement a VBP campaign for a potential customer. It’s not automatically triggered when you run into resistance on an initial sales call. You have to be disciplined and analytical about it.

In fact, you need to ask yourself two tough self-directed qualifying questions and be sure to give yourself completely honest answers.

   Self-Directed Question 1: Is this customer a great fit for our product or service? Not a good fit, but a great fit. Does she fit the profile your company has established for the target customer for your product? This is prequalification before the customer begins the buying process.

   Self-Directed Question 2: Is the solution I’m selling clearly superior to the alternatives the customer is already using or could acquire in the near term? Set aside your corporate loyalty for a minute, and answer honestly.

In sum, you are answering the question, “Should I persist?”

There is no obvious answer to this question. Salespeople want to be convinced of the superiority of the solutions they sell, but the hard truth is that their solutions aren’t always superior. Some products are better suited for some customers than for others.

Therefore, you have to be absolutely honest with your answers. Simply put, are you a better fit with the prospect’s requirements than the other guys? Do you provide more value than a competitive solution? In similar situations, with similar customers, have you reliably beaten the competition? And have your customers been totally satisfied with the solutions you have provided?

There is a real downside to answering the questions incorrectly. You risk investing your most precious and limited resource—your time—pursuing a customer who will never buy from you. Think of all the other sales opportunities you will have to forego in order to work on this one. That is a big bet.

Let’s ask the question again: Are you absolutely, positively the best solution for this customer? If the answer is no, then you need to just walk away. Other potential customers will be out there who will be better fits for your product. If the answer is yes, then you can proceed with your VBP campaign.

Many salespeople have a problem maintaining a balanced approach to persistent follow-up. You want to stay in touch with your prospects, but you don’t want impose a constant full-court press on them. Remember that you are nurturing your relationship with prospects until their timing is right. You want to stay in communication, but prospects will continue to take your calls or respond to your e-mail only if you take pains to ensure that each communication delivers something of value to them. That means the information you provide has to serve a specific purpose, it has to have impact, and it has to respect the customer’s time and yours.

Here are four simple steps to implement Value-Based Persistence in your selling:

1. Identify and gather all the critical pieces of information that your prospect requires to make an informed decision to purchase your product or service. Don’t guess. Make a list of all the essential data that can be presented to or reviewed independently by the prospect. White papers, case studies, media coverage, product announcements, testimonials, webinars, videos, and seminars are just a few examples of the kinds of information that can deliver value to the customer.

2. Review each item on the list for its quantifiable value. Don’t guess or assume that an item on the list will deliver value. Write down what the value is. What questions does it answer? What context does it create or insight does it provide for the prospect? Can the prospect use this content to learn something essential about how the prospect would use your product? Does it provide insight that illuminates the quantifiable value the customer could realize from using your product? Or does the information help the customer to make a better decision?

Keep in mind that the information you provide as part of VBP has to distinguish you from your competition or the entrenched supplier. The customer doesn’t want to hear that you are just as good as the other guys. If you are just one more mindless seller of a me-too product, then the customer won’t have time for you. Give prospects a reason to engage with you and to listen to you.

3. Develop a delivery schedule to provide the information to the customer. You don’t want to deliver the information all at once, of course. Because you know the chronology in which the information will be useful in the prospect’s information gathering, create a schedule for delivering it and enter it into your CRM system. Use scheduled reminders from your CRM system or calendar to stay in sync with the customer.

4. Use intelligent tools to help deliver content to your prospect. Don’t rely just on e-mails or phone calls to provide the information to the customer. Look at new collaborative sales engagement tools that enable you to create private information collections for your prospects, who will then receive e-mail notifications when you add additional content to their collections. These tools also provide analytics that enable you to track the customer’s engagement with your content. For instance, you can learn which content customers viewed and how much time they spent on a particular page.

Then be persistent. If you create value for the buyer, you will eventually be given the opportunity to get in the door. It may take weeks or months. I’ve sold some multimillion-dollar deals that took years to mature to the point where the customer was ready to move forward. But when that day arrived, I had, to a large degree, already presold the customer on my solution. By using Value-Based Persistence, my odds of winning that order were substantially better than anyone else’s.