CHAPTER TWO
Earning the Right to Win
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
—BRUCE LEE
ARE YOU REALLY THE PERSON WORTHY OF THE SUCCESS YOU seek? Go stare in the mirror—look deep inside your soul. Truth be told, most people in leadership roles secretly worry about being found out. The real deal is rare, and most salespeople are full of crap, projecting a persona of clichéd social bravado and wearing a suit of confidence. What’s really there when people or circumstances scratch past the surface? Do you really have the right values? Is it all about your client and your team, rather than yourself?
I was managing director for the Asia-Pacific region of a North American multinational, and we won a massive contract. It meant paying my salesperson half a million dollars in commission and paying each of the five people on the pre-sales team the equivalent of their annual salaries in a single bonus. It was one of the biggest worldwide deals in the company’s history, and my commission was also substantial. We got the contract signed, and we all celebrated. But then I got a phone call from my boss overseas. “They don’t want to pay that much commission to anyone. There is a clause in the compensation plan about out-of-the-ordinary ‘bluebird’ business opportunities being exempt.” They offered to pay me all of what I was owed if I could negotiate the amount of commission down for those who worked for me, especially the sales rep. My instant response was “no.”
We had been pursuing this opportunity for years. There was nothing out of blue about it at all. We were an enterprise software company, and the deal had been in the CRM right from the beginning. We had been tracking it in the pipeline and forecast reports for over 15 months. Long story short, I talked with the CFO and rather than treating him as the enemy, I treated the situation as the problem. I listened and sought to understand the root cause of our problem. It was the “out of whack” levels of commission (due to accelerators on our deal) being paid in a single quarter compared with global revenue. If we could defer the payments, it would smooth the problem into downstream quarters. I called the salesperson and explained the dilemma. I said, “If I wait nine months, will you wait six months? Then we can pay all the pre-sales team their full commission this quarter.” He agreed without hesitation, saying, “They worked the hardest on this, so they deserve to get paid first.” We both deferred and eventually received our money. It was gratifying to take the pre-sales team to lunch and watch them receive their checks.
Values are everything. So are attitude and commitment. What happens once you’ve danced around in your corner before the opening bell for round one? Will you hold to your values and do what is right regardless of the temptations or obstacles? After all the bravado and trash talk, once you get punched in the head, can you keep moving forward to go toe-to-toe in the ring as a genuine heavyweight contender? The personal foundation you build will determine the platform on which you will perform.
Foundations of Executive Engagement
C-level executives are drivers. They want to drive straight to the point. They’re not interested in chitchat, and they’re usually just dying to see their family. But even the leader of the free world will be stopped in their tracks by a relevant data point or insight. Successful people got there with an insatiable hunger to know, to learn, to improve, and to master interdisciplinary skills.
Your first step in accessing the CXO in the corner office is to think from their viewpoint—by using empathy. What are they primarily concerned about with their business? If it’s a publicly traded company, this is usually revealed in the annual letter to the shareholders or quarterly call. You can also find some financially savvy friends or colleagues to help you go through their balance sheet and financials. Jonathan Farrington says it best: “Most important of all, you have to identify where or how you can make a significant contribution in helping them achieve their overall goals this year. How can you help them save, gain, reduce, increase or improve? These are the five magic words that grab C-suite residents.”
Boiling this down, it’s generally going to be efficiency (cutting costs) or revenue (increasing top line), and then more efficiency—doing things to get higher outputs that accrue to the bottom line. This includes staffing up, staffing down, retrofitting existing processes with lean Six Sigma, or changing the business-unit structure. It may include piecemealing together disparate technology systems or sending the whole pile to the scrap heap for a new unified system.
Organizations must still be pursued from top down, with a unified message that has one singular theme—not a pastiche or more white noise. In the old days, this was called selling to VITO (Very Important Top Officer), and Anthony Parinello trademarked processes for getting in high. Authority and hierarchy have not changed much in the Fortune 1000, and even start-ups are pretty insular and autocratic when you break it down. That means that if some junior person has the most ingenious idea to collaborate on with a vendor, they’ll usually get neutralized in a heartbeat to cut costs. You need authority to sanction the conversation and smoke out the committee, whether permanent or temporary, for a deal cycle.
Executives are protected by a bulletproof glass shield that is their executive assistant. Don’t be fooled, the EA is likely one smart cookie. It’s a mistake to think this person isn’t running the CEO’s life. They are. So pitch to the EA as a deputy or proxy to the C-level you’re looking for. Good leaders and senior executives are not vain or narcissistic, but they are extremely selective with their time. When you see one quoted in a magazine article, online trade journal, or any excerpt from an event, you’ve literally struck gold. They are men and women of few words. If you reference specifics from their quotes in the press and tie this back to the value of your solution, you’ll land meetings left and right. You’ve got to be thoughtful about it, just like when you reference details from their annual reports.
The most important thing is to respect the C-level’s time and get to the point by starting at the end. They want to know what you want from them and why it is important. The conversation could go like this: “I believe there’s a real opportunity to [insert tangible business benefit here], and once we’ve met, I’d like you to sponsor an engagement with [insert the names of leaders in the business areas you will positively impact]. We will invest time together to create a business case we can bring back to you.” Then provide some additional detail. The C-level person now knows why they’re investing time in the conversation and what you want from them.
The Language of Leaders and Relevance Challenge
The problem for those aspiring to leadership, and for those in sales, is that you’re delegated down to those you sound like. For example, if you start talking technology, they will respond with: “You need to talk with our IT department.” Strategic selling, by definition, means engaging with the person who owns the problem or opportunity that you seek to address. They may not even have the word chief in their title, but every time you identify the buyer or person who owns the budget and can approve or veto a decision, think of them as the “CEO of the problem.” The CEO and their inner circle of CXOs and domain leaders are the ones you must delightfully surprise as you spring from the bushes and wow them with how you engage.
But if you are to elevate how you influence and sell, and to engage at the CEO or CXO level, you need to speak the language of leadership. This includes two important points:
1. Discuss how you can deliver business outcomes and manage their risks.
2. Talk about the numbers and the business case, plus how success will be measured.
This is the essence of leading with why the conversation matters, and it focuses on the business outcomes they care about. That’s really what leaders want. If you can also learn to speak the language of numbers, then you can start to become a trusted adviser. This allows you to work with your client in partnership, rather than being perceived as someone who’s merely attempting to sell. Every seller needs to do these three things:
1. Lead with insight and engage by having a perspective on the client’s world.
2. Build trust beyond mere rapport, with relentless positive intent and business literacy.
3. Create value in every conversation, backed up with real evidence.
These three together are the foundation on which the seller earns the right to gain understanding, propose solutions, and ask for the business as a trusted adviser. Beyond this foundation, strategic selling is first and foremost defined by early engagement at the most senior level possible. You may not need to engage the CEO of the organization, but you do need to sell to the person who actually owns the problem or opportunity. This is the person who is on the hook for delivering the result, the one who controls the funding and authorizes the decision—this is whom you need to engage. Everyone else is a mere influencer, recommender, or blocker.
How do you actually engage effectively at the CXO level? What do CXOs typically care about? Beyond mere results, the very best leaders focus on making a difference, treasuring time, building up people, and leaving a legacy. Here are 10 rules to honor on your quest to engage successfully:
1. Be a person of value, a domain expert who can help make things happen. No one likes being sold to, but people do value relevant information, insight, and perspective from someone with humble wisdom, a strong network, and the gravitas to carry the conversation.
2. Start at the end and lead with why. Get to the point and be concise. Genuine insights are rare and never clichéd, so do your homework and understand why the conversation is important. Only once you’ve anchored the conversation should you talk about the what, how, who, and when.
3. Open powerfully by not talking about yourself; make it all about them. Show that you’ve done your homework and that you understand how you can help deliver their agenda, solve their problems, or realize their opportunities—both personally and professionally.
4. Speak the language of leadership: finding positive outcomes and managing risk.
5. Speak the language of business: delivering financial results and achieving KPIs.
6. Speak the language of legacy: enacting sustainable change that makes a difference in the lives of customers, staff, and the community.
7. No faking it and no bullshit. Know the industry and have evidence to support your assertions. Be masterful at telling powerful, true stories, but be conservative in your claims. Also be honest and transparent. If you don’t know, then say so.
8. Always be early, have an agenda, respect time, and follow up in writing. In short, be a professional.
9. Let them be in control. Simply ask them what they want to see happen after the meeting and what the next steps should be to create progress. But when they sponsor you down, always maintain your direct relationship and the right to contact them whenever necessary. People are best motivated by reasons they themselves discover. Never preach, sell, or lecture. Instead, ask insightful open questions that cause them self-reflection.
10. Always deliver on every promise, have integrity, and be rock-solid reliable.
All of this is relatively straightforward, but there is something else that dramatically elevates the way you engage at the CXO level.
Paradox of Nonhunger and Genuine Curiosity
The power of nonhunger has been explored in “the hottest one at the bar” story. It is also known as the Law of Principled Disinterest. This comes with a paradox: You can come across as arrogant or uninterested. Conversely, the more interest you show in closing a deal, the more repulsed the prospect will be. Jeb Blount calls this the “universal law of need.” It’s the idea that when you need a deal so badly, you’re going to have sales breath—a repellent to prospects.
How do you manage the paradox between nonhunger and engagement? Ali could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” The best salespeople are not desperate but genuinely curious. They seek to be interested rather than needy. They have no desire to pitch anything until the buyer is in the zone.
Genuinely curious people ask the best questions because they are not seeking to manipulate or steer the conversation in a predetermined direction. The genuinely curious have an advantage when prospecting because questioning is in their DNA, and they don’t have to fake it. Barry Rhein advocates selling through curiosity, and he is famous for being paid equity on future revenue performance by his customers.
The egomaniac blabbermouth never gets to the root cause, so they can’t ever really propose the right solution. However, curious people with the right values go through hell and high water to understand another person’s business. They actively listen to cultivate curiosity on both sides, and this is fundamentally important to COMBO strategies.
A big fat sales pipeline, nonhunger and curiosity, combined with a love of customers and enjoyment in making a difference, prevents sales burnout. You can afford to focus on alignment rather than pressure for a close. These values beat negative attempts at Machiavellian manipulation or brute force tactics. Hunting big game is going to take an extremely sharp spear and a willingness to walk away, exhibit gravitas, and stay dead calm while operating at the highest echelons. You cannot lose your cool, nor can you become hungry, needy, or pushy. It’s crucial at all times to be creating value in conversations, listening proactively, and remaining detached from the outcome of the deal.
By filling your pipeline with 3–5X the qualified opportunities that you need to hit your number, you gain the confidence you need. On the phone, tone is 86 percent of our communication.1 Other research revealed that words account for just 7 percent of received communication.2 Whether it is 7 percent or 14 percent, words alone account for a minor portion of influence.
The whole point of this book is for you to consistently build a pipeline that takes almost all the pressure out of selling, where you focus on alignment rather than persuasion and the business case rather than the pitch. To do this, you must lead with value rather than relationship.
Friending and Relationship Selling
All sellers need relationships with buyers, but the last thing a buyer wants in their busy day is a salesperson seeking to “friend them” on social or on the phone. No one worth selling to is lonely and bored and looking for a new friend or a salesperson to come and tell them about the joys and wonders of their products. Leading with a relationship sell or a pitch is therefore a giant mistake. Instead, lead with insight and value in the very first conversation, and build a meaningful relationship of trust over time.
Executives like to put salespeople to the test. They put the fake family photos on their desk, a big stuffed marlin or trout on the wall, and some trophies on the bookcase. But the joke is on the seller because the punchline is that it’s a test. The average salesperson will come in and start talking about fishing or their family to try to build rapport. Savvy executives are so sick of this that they literally play practical jokes on sellers.
One senior executive told the story of when he received a magnum of Veuve Cliquot, and then posted on LinkedIn offering to give it away to the person with the best comment. He did this to highlight just how disingenuous it felt for him to get buttered up with free gifts.
The book The Challenger Sale was pivotal in revealing the profile of those who are most likely to succeed in securing the C-suite. “Challengers account for nearly 40% of all high performers while Relationship Builders come in dead last at only 7% of high performers.”3 Ironically, relationships are essential and not to be undervalued.
For eons, it seems, sales executives were encouraged to either blaze a trail as the lone wolf or focus all effort on being likable with rapport-building skills. From “smiling and dialing” to golfing, this was the nature of the beast in the 1980s and 90s. Get out your pink Izods and Miami Vice white blazer, and get ready to go deep-sea fishing or occupy your private box at the game with beer and shrimp cocktails.
What’s wild now with the Cambrian-style explosion of the Information Age is that buyers can easily source all the information they want. They only seek to talk to experts who share best practices, trends, and true insights that give them an edge against the competition. Blunt practitioners of value, who deliver insight immediately, become the trusted advisers at light speed. While the CFO has free football tickets delivered to their desk by their executive assistant, you’re actually in the meeting pitching to them. This is because you’re showing them how to hit their roadmap targets six months earlier by implementing a business process management system in the cloud that lowers their overhead by 30 percent.
You can meet powerful people at networking events, charity galas, and celebrity golf and poker tournaments, and you can shoot the breeze all day. But these relationship socials never beat an engineer of value, who FedExes to the CXO’s desk a plain manila envelope containing pearls of wisdom for accelerating profit. This document contains information on how to see around the curve and deliver important outcomes while managing risk.
Rather than leading with a relationship and providing value with what you sell, lead instead with insight and value in every meeting and document. Value is the reason people will initially engage, and it builds a relationship of trust over time. In new business development, lead with value and then build a relationship—never seek to reverse the order, even with a referral.
The Truth About Trust and Value
People have always done business with those they know, like, and trust. In fact, all business is done at “the speed of trust,” as Stephen Covey says, and it’s almost impossible to win a new client without the presence of trust. I think you can see that trust is an essential prerequisite for sales success and almost everything else that is worthwhile in life. This is why having positive reference clients and a strong personal brand is so important.
Don’t focus on analyst reports that place your company or solution in some kind of magic quadrant. Customers don’t really believe those slides because all of your competitors march in with similar claims of market leadership or superiority. Never allow your confidence cup to runneth over so much that you appear arrogant. Instead, always have empathy and humility, and never say that you “dominate the market.” Instead, use the phrase “we lead the market,” and talk about how you’ve helped other relevant customers achieve real business results.
Make no mistake, your online reputation, corporate and individual, is critically important because professional buyers and executives do their research before deciding to engage and meet face-to-face. If a sales lead has come to you, then the customer is normally well advanced in their process and your online presence and credentials will have been pivotal in being included on their list. Creating a strong personal brand will be covered later. Here, we will focus on how to create trust with the buyer. Figure 2-1 shows my formula for how to build trust with individuals and teams.
FIGURE 2-1. FORMULA FOR BUILDING TRUST
Most salespeople spend way too much time on the back end of the formula by talking about their capability and reputation. This part of the formula is the easy area for salespeople to talk about because it’s in their comfort zone. Your company, products, and solutions may be what you know most about and what your marketing department has invested a fortune in honing. But it’s a huge mistake to lead with these things. The customer instead cares about what you can do for them and whether you have the right level of understanding and aligned values.
Evidencing capability and reputation is important but only to support the customer’s decision to buy, which occurs much later in the relationship. The vast majority of buyers will research you before you get to have a meeting, so use your LinkedIn profile, website, and social media presence to tick that box. When you actually engage in a conversation with a customer, make it all about them by focusing on the front end of the formula: Genuinely understand their needs, constraints, problems, and opportunities. Show them that you are someone who listens, asks intelligent questions, values their time, understands their culture, respects their processes, delivers results, and will work as an extended member of their team. Having aligned values is hugely powerful.
The best sales professionals focus on understanding and insight rather than pushing features and benefits. They frame what they have to say as thoughtful open questions. They are committed to working in the best interests of the customer and avoid trust-destroying rhetorical questions that are usually perceived as manipulative or redundant.
Plan every sales call and meeting. Lead with insight and strive to talk no more than one-third of the time. The reason this is so important is because listening is the most powerful form of influence, and you learn nothing while talking. Listening and asking intelligent open questions are the keys to gaining understanding and building trust in every situation, especially in selling, negotiation, and conflict resolution situations.
Building trust requires a substantial investment of time and energy in gaining, and then demonstrating, an understanding of the customer’s industry and business. Anthony Iannarino describes this as “situational awareness,” and it includes having an understanding of the customer’s economic and market conditions, internal politics and power base, problems and opportunities, and, most important, biggest challenges they face with their own customers. Nic Dennis says, “Invest extra time in preparing and practicing great questions because that’s how you will be remembered and invited back again.”4
But hang on, you may be thinking, COMBO is about rapid levels of effective activity, so how can I generate insights for my conversations quickly and on the fly? You are right; unless you are targeting large enterprises, you don’t have the luxury of time for deep research when prospecting. That’s why it is so important to work in industry verticals or with a specialized domain area or set of business problems. It is also why you must position your insights in terms of a humble hypothesis of value, rather than act like a Challenger bull in the china shop.
By specializing, you can understand the typical value levers that apply to your prospective customers and markets. Although you can set a vision with the customer for a potential future state, it’s important to remember that the customer, not you, determines value. Any business case must quantify the costs and risks associated with staying in the current state before positioning the benefits of a future state. Only the customer is qualified to assess value for money and the positive impact on their economic metrics and business drivers. Nevertheless, everything you sell must help customers improve revenue and/or margin; or reduce cost, time, or effort; or reduce serious risks.
The basic equation for value (shown in Figure 2-2) is: Business Value = Benefit minus Cost, and this is why it’s so important to ensure that all benefits are expressed in monetized form wherever possible. Yes, it’s true that not all benefits save or make money for the customer. For example, less stress, improved productivity, or less risk in noncritical areas can all be difficult to justify in financial terms. The language of business is numbers, not words, so always ask yourself: How does this benefit drop to their bottom line or improve their balance sheet?
FIGURE 2-2. FORMULA FOR BUSINESS VALUE
When prospecting and engaging in initial conversations, you must lead with value as defined by the customer. To be clear, they see no value in having another business friend or supplier relationship to manage, nor do they see any benefit in buying from you. According to Graham Hawkins, vendor rationalization (doing more business with fewer vendors) means that buyers are not permitted to purchase your product even if they wanted to. Some procurement organizations have policies in place to block off-panel purchases. They do, however, typically see value in the insights a third party can provide concerning what their competitors or relevant peers are doing. Qualify early concerning their ability to buy from you, and ask them to explain how the process works if they want to become a customer.
People are most open to these conversations when there has been change or some form of trigger event. Craig Elias and Tibor Shanto wrote about trigger events for pipeline creation in their excellent book Shift! There is a window after a job change where CXOs deploy a million dollars in capital on innovation and change initiatives, which sellers can tap into. In this scenario, someone has just been promoted or switched companies, and the weight of the world is upon their shoulders to overachieve in the first 90 days. This is where a savvy seller can come in, collaborate on a business case based on relevant similar clients, and do a six- or seven-figure deal. This can happen when the “pain of same is greater than the pain of change.” This comes back to “speed to trust,” as Stephen Covey put it, because the more relevant the need or stronger the pain, the sooner you can diagnose it, solve it, and help your customer to be a hero.
Value is often intrinsic, but it can be extrinsic in the sense that there can be political value to the win. The right technology can help a decision-maker gain the corner office or revolutionize a division. This is why Jim Holden’s seminal work, Power Base Selling, is important for all salespeople to read. As the buying committee balloons to seven people,5 you start to see nontraditional power structures build. Jim Holden nails this concept with the “situational fox” in his book The New Power Base Selling, and Miller Heiman expresses this as a champion or coach in the account.
From the perspective of COMBO, you’re trying to flush out these people and their allies early, set meetings in parallel by multi-threading (generating multiple communication avenues to multiple stakeholders), and then bring the committees together to form consensus around value. In the book The Challenger Customer, this idea of consensus is debunked—it says by challenging the many fiefdoms, you typically bring on even more dysfunction and gridlock. In order to win, the book posits, one must break down the group’s mental model and help it construct a new one.
Again, the inherent flaw in all the closing methodologies is that there’s no point in mastering the flying of an Airbus A380 if you can’t even get it off the ground. That’s just as crazy as never learning to land it, which we’ll get into later. So while all this is relevant once you have a major opportunity in play, I include it here because the way you open is more important than how you close. Strategic selling is defined by engaging early at the most senior levels and then setting an agenda of unique value that creates disadvantage to, or even excludes, all competition.
All sellers need deep understanding of complex enterprise selling, but when it comes to building pipeline and driving high levels of proactive outreach, you just have to get on with it and have a bias toward intelligent action! You need to know only enough to secure the meeting, so don’t try to boil the ocean with research. Again, if you are selling into a particular industry vertical, then there are common problems every player is facing. Take the time to go deep on these issues because they will apply in every engagement. But when it comes to individual companies and buyer personas, you must be pragmatic in rapidly executing research.
The Art of Pragmatic Research
The world’s biggest and most powerful business directory is LinkedIn. But it goes beyond that to also provide amazing insights into what potential clients are thinking, who they know, where they were educated, where they’ve worked, what interests them most, who can provide you with coaching or an introduction, and more. That’s why Microsoft paid a staggering $26.2 billion for the company in 2016. I will provide details later on how to use Sales Navigator to rapidly source insights about the power base of individuals within the enterprise you are targeting. But first, let’s explore how to rapidly research your target client’s industry.
Sourcing insight and data points that are relevant to the prospect’s world is about synthesis of a broad swath of data. That’s why social platforms are so powerful. If you followed 30 omni-channel retail CMOs and started to piece together that patchwork quilt into a sensible amalgam of insights, you’d have data points to bring back to each one of them. They are often blind to these insights because they are on the inside looking out—they can’t see past their hermetically sealed box of a system.
The basic search information you use is the name of the company and the name of the prospect popped into Google. Then you click on News. You can sort the results by last month through to last year. This is basic, but if you’re using the “show them you know them” technique, you’re already ahead of 90 percent of other sellers. This is because most of your competition is lazy or unimaginative—their approach may sound something like: “I read your profile and see that you love the Chicago Bears.” Again, this is a losing approach of relationship selling, and it provides no value in helping the client drive business forward, reduce costs, or make money.
Beware the dangers of shallow clichés. Jill Konrath gives an entire list of buzzwords to be avoided in her book SNAP Selling. Talk like a real human being, and leave the jargon behind. You get delegated down to whom you sound like, so it’s crucial that you speak like a leader and use real-world customer examples of outcomes. It is incredibly powerful to view your target client’s world through the eyes of their customers—they are the CEO’s real boss.
Part of researching a target account is to first locate who can make the decision. This is often as simple as doing advanced searches on the role responsibilities in LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator through Lead Builder. If you are selling mobile, search the 10,000-person bank for any profiles that have the word mobile in the title. Perhaps it’s ERP or HR software—then do an advanced search for profiles within the highly matrixed organization that mention that acronym on the page.
You can search 100,000 profiles in a nanosecond. I’ve even seen extremely rare classifications, skills, programming languages, and code-base requirements uncovered like a needle in a haystack in near real time by using this research technique. The best recruitment consultants are masterful at Boolean searching. They can find the people who are not being found by their lazy or ignorant competitors who don’t know how to scratch past the surface of a rudimentary search.
If you claim to be a sales professional, then you should know how to construct a Boolean search within any search engine and LinkedIn. Google it and also watch YouTube tutorials to educate yourself about it. Find a recruiter and ask them to show you how they find people within LinkedIn—you’ll be amazed. This is a fundamental skill you need to master.
Leading with Insight and Why a Conversation Matters
Our conversations need to anchor senior engagement so that they agree later to sponsor us to their team for the purpose of discovery, consensus building, and business case development. The reality is that you have only 20 to 40 seconds to create the right impression and hook the interest of the person with whom you are seeking to engage. This is especially true in the age of social media, sound bites, and executive ADD. Buyers and decision-makers have never had less time.
To succeed, you must focus on why a conversation matters rather than lead with what you do and how you do it. The what and how are irrelevant until they first know why they should invest time in talking with you. By focusing on why a conversations matters, we overcome the worst competitor—the option of merely doing nothing. If we establish a compelling reason why change is necessary, then we overcome client apathy and earn the right to help them build a strong, compelling business case for going ahead with transformation. This approach feeds into talking about business outcomes and the business case for investing and taking on risk.
As you prepare your own narrative, ask yourself this important question: What’s the business problem I can solve for the client, and why should that be a priority for them? Then ask: How do I create compelling business case value better than anybody else? And finally: How can I lead with insight to create value in a conversation? The answer to this last question is especially important because leading with insight is how you earn the right to have a conversation with a senior person. Think about this fact validated by CEB Research: The way we sell (engage) is more important than what we sell (our product, service, or solution). CEB Research surveyed 5,000 buyers and discovered that 53 percent of a competitive selection is based upon the experience the seller creates for the buyer. Price or value contribute a mere 9 percent to the buying decision, and brand, product, and service capabilities together contribute 38 percent.6
Here is how I teach my students to open after briefly introducing themselves with some context (common connection, trigger event, etc.). “The reason I’m calling is that I work with others in your industry and I’ve done some research on your company. I think you may have the opportunity to achieve [nominate a specific business outcome you typically deliver]. I think it’s important because [cite industry trend], and I’d like to share some of my findings with you and discuss how you could potentially improve results. How is Thursday of next week?”
This narrative answers questions in the mind of the potential customer. It’s important because “leaping out of the bushes” with your initial outreach must quickly explain who you are, why you want their time, and how they will benefit from the conversation. No friending, no pitching—just brief context and then a request for their time to discuss your insights about their industry and competition and the trends that matter to them.
Become masterful at opening because it sets the agenda and begins the process of building trust and credibility. Once you’ve anchored a customer initiative with purpose (the why), you can be an engineer of value rather than just a warrior of persuasion.
Creating Your Own Value Narrative
In the eyes of the buyer, all sellers look pretty much the same. It’s a brutal truth that sales and marketing leaders need to confront. The way most companies seek to overcome this is by creating a beautiful and engaging “customer experience.” This is designed to support the buyer’s journey as they research, evaluate, decide, approve, purchase, renew, and then advocate.
Marketing departments seek to differentiate customer experience strategies, leveraging content, tools, and platforms that attract and engage buyers on the web, on social, and on mobile devices. Salespeople also need to differentiate. The compelling point of difference for salespeople is their domain expertise and insightful value narrative, evidenced and supported by their personal brand and network within LinkedIn. This is my simple framework for creating your own value narrative that sets you apart from your competition and engages senior buyers and decision-makers:
1. Provide context through a trigger event or referral.
2. Lead with a genuine insight or relevant point of view about their industry or business.
3. State the opportunity for them or (less ideal) the consequences of inaction.
4. Bridge with why it’s important, and (only if needed) have evidence to back up your claim.
5. Explain the specific business outcomes you can help them achieve (do not mention your products, services, or solutions), and ask for their time with an appointment. If you secure an appointment, stop, thank them, and send a LinkedIn connection request, confirmation email with an agenda, and also a calendar invitation.
6. Ask open questions that lead to your business value, and create the reason to engage.
7. Have powerful true stories that evidence your claims.
8. Ask for their time with an appointment. Send a LinkedIn connection request, confirmation email with an agenda, and also a calendar invitation.
One of my clients is the New Zealand government’s international business development agency, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE). Its purpose is to grow companies internationally—bigger, better, and faster—for the benefit of New Zealand. As part of my work with NZTE, I helped its own business development managers and management teams elevate the narrative they were using to engage companies that were candidates for NZTE’s services.
Before my workshops, NZTE was approached by CEOs considering overseas expansion, the pitch was typically: “New Zealand Trade and Enterprise has offices in 40 international locations, and we offer services for companies that are either exporting or looking to set up an office overseas. We can help with. . . .” The person would then start going through the list of services offered hoping that something would resonate with the CEO or owner of the business.
We transformed that approach to be in line with my framework, and used the COMBO of phone calls, voice mails, and supporting emails and messages. The new approach looked like this: “Hi [client name]. I’m [your name], from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. [Open with context of trigger event or referral]. We work with others in your industry, and based on my research I think you could accelerate your push into international markets and also minimize risk. The reason that’s important is that companies in our portfolio typically achieve nearly double the growth of those not working with us. The common traits for those who succeed are a clear understanding of the target market, a strong value proposition, and the right local partnerships. How is your calendar next week?”
The above incorporates points 1 through 5 of the framework, and if the person wants more information before committing, then you ask questions like this: “What are you doing now to manage the risks of entering the market? What’s your strategy in leveraging local partnerships?”
Regardless of their responses, you then say, “Great. To maximize the likelihood of success, you can leverage the experience of others who’ve done this before. We’ve helped many companies avoid wasting time and money and instead achieve their goals. How is your calendar next week?”
Then you tag it with this last question, which helps determine the strength of the business case for engaging: “What are your revenue growth expectations in the first three years, and how are you tracking?”
Then ask again for the meeting. “We can help you develop the right plan through market intelligence, strategic planning, relationships, resources, and focus. It definitely makes sense for us to talk; what day works best for you next week?”
For yourself right now, take this framework and craft your own value narrative for a target vertical or market and with a specific buyer persona in mind. This will be the most senior person you can engage with who makes or approves the buying decision. Invest in creating the right narrative. There is no point in getting busy with prospecting and outreach if you’re like a deer in the headlights when someone asks why you’ve called them. Here is a template for you to use:
Brief introduction for context and then: “I’m calling because your industry is . . .”
“I’ve been working with others in your sector and based on my research of your company, I think there’s an opportunity for you to . . .”
“I’d like 40 minutes to meet, and I think it’s important because . . .”
“I’ve been able to help ABC company achieve XYZ, and I don’t know yet whether you could get the same kind of results, but that’s why I want to meet.”
“What time is best for you on . . .”
“I thought you’d have questions; let’s cover those when we meet. How is your calendar?”
Create three open questions that lead to your business value.
Your true relevant customer stories/case studies with emotional resonance.
Seriously, commit to doing this very challenging piece of work, and honestly answer these questions: If you were a CEO, would you buy from someone like you? Can you really carry the conversation at senior levels? Do you have genuine insight about the customer’s industry and issues? Do you focus on the business outcomes you can deliver for them? Can you have a conversation without mentioning your products or services?
There is no point hammering away with high levels of activity if you’re doing it the wrong way! You must be both effective and efficient if you are to create the success you deserve. “A fool with a tool is just a busier fool,”7 as Jill Rowley says. Having the right narrative also requires the ability to ask the right questions, so let’s explore how to create these and ask them in the most powerful way.
Questions That Qualify and Set the Agenda
Explaining facts or pushing a value proposition often repels the other person. Rather than leading with a pitch, you must instead lead to the business value you offer. This is important because people are best motivated for reasons that they themselves discover.
Questions are how you guide a conversation. In my workshops and training courses, I often do an exercise where people team up with a partner and take turns asking each other only open questions for two minutes. It amazes me how few can execute the task successfully. An open question forces the other person to engage in meaningful conversation. Here are some examples of open versus closed questions:
Closed: Is that a serious problem for you?
Open: How does that impact the business and you personally?
Closed: When can you sign the paperwork?
Open: What’s your timing and process for being able to go ahead with this?
Closed: If we could do that, would you buy from us?
Open: If we could do that, how would that change things for you?
One of the negative byproducts of asking closed questions is that the prospect can feel manipulated and raise objections. Objections reduce the probability of a sale by damaging trust and momentum and usually occur when the seller seeks progression before the buyer is ready. Objections can be avoided if the seller ensures understanding before seeking commitment, and this is why asking insightful open questions is so important.
Almost all questions should be asked in the open format, and closed, manipulative questions are to be avoided. True story: A life insurance person once asked me if I loved my wife and children, and then whether I wanted the very best for them. I just smiled at him, and I’m sure he thought, Game over! He was right. I showed him the door.
You have created your value narrative and a few questions that lead to value so that you can secure the first commitment from the buyer—their precious time. Once you have that appointment and get yourself on-site, you will need to go deeper. There are two types of questions that all sellers need to ask if they are to build quality sales pipeline. These are qualification questions and discovery questions.
Qualifying is not just about eliminating time-wasters, and the seller should avoid asking clumsy closed questions, as they execute the process. Instead of asking: “Are you the decision-maker?” you could ask: “If the business case was strong, who else would you need to involve before going ahead with this?
Just because some of the answers to qualification questions are negative does not necessarily mean you should walk away. If the buyer does not have committed funding (different from having a budget) that does not mean you qualify out. You could instead explore whether it makes sense to invest together in building their business case. This is how you strategically influence their requirements and the way they will go to market for a solution.
The best salespeople combine qualification and discovery to build understanding and trust, and also to create progression. No one likes being just qualified, so you need to nuance your approach by asking open questions that uncover the truth and your priorities. Here are some open questions for digging deeper in a way that encourages the prospective client to engage with you to build mutual trust and understanding:
I’ve done my homework, but there are some questions I think only you can answer—may we cover a few of these now?
What’s really driving the need to make this kind of investment?
You’re very busy and have lots of people seeking meetings with you, so why did you agree to meet with me today?
What has to be delivered in terms of business outcomes?
Where do you see the risks?
What is your process and timing for having a solution in place?
What other options are you considering? Why are these attractive?
What happened inside your organization that caused you to look at investing in this area?
What’s the business case for making the investment and changing the way things currently operate?
Who’s impacted internally and who else needs to be onboard before you can go ahead?
How is the project being funded and, beyond a budget, what sort of funding is already secured?
When does this need to be implemented and delivering results? Why is that date important and what happens if it slips?
These questions enable the seller to focus on how they can help deliver the necessary outcome and manage the buyer’s risks. The questions lead to understanding about budget, decision authority, timing, and whether the buying decision is really a priority.
The most important qualification factor is not any of the qualification questions, but instead whether the buyer will engage in a conversation, then provide information, insight, and access to their team. Be worried if the lion’s share of activity is from the selling organization because a passive buyer who just sucks you dry of information is unlikely to transact anything, except maybe validate your parking.
Many qualified opportunities in CRM systems are lost to client apathy—in other words, they are doing nothing and maintaining the status quo. A 2016 study of 675 selling organizations revealed that 24 percent of qualified opportunities are in fact lost to nondecision with the potential customer failing to buy anything at all.8
Every salesperson must therefore be able to answer the following three questions:
1. Why will this customer buy anything at all?
2. Why will this customer buy from us?
3. What’s our strategy to provide best value and lowest risk in the eyes of the buyer?
Access to those with decision authority and economic power is the most important common mandatory requirement. At a more granular level, these are the various qualification frameworks that help you decide whether to invest in an opportunity pursuit:
ANUM: Authority, Need, Urgency, Money
BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, Time frame
BMANTRR: Budget, Method, Authority, Need, Timing, Risks, Roadblocks
FAINT: Funding, Authority, Interest, Need, Time frame
GPCT: Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline (Hubspot)
MANDACCT: Money, Authority, Need, Decision criteria, Ability to deliver, Competition, Coach, Timescale
MEDDICC: Metrics for ROI, Economic buyer, Decision process, Decision criteria, Identify pain, Champion coach, Compelling event
NUTCASE: Need, Unique, Timing, Cash, Authority, Solution, Enemies
RSVPselling: right Relationships, winning Strategy, unique compelling Value, strong Process alignment
SCOTSMAN: Situation, Competition, basis Of decision, Time-scale, Solution, Money, Authority, Need
TAS: Target Account Selling 20 questions
Beyond qualification, you are looking for potential clients who are either in rapid growth or crisis mode. Organizations in steady state are notoriously prone to moving at a glacial pace or simply doing nothing. Every CRM system should have a field for organization mode, as it impacts the probability of closing.
If, despite your efforts to elevate the conversation, the buyer seems intent on keeping you at arm’s length and obsessively focuses on features, functions, and price, then it’s a safe bet to politely qualify out. There is no shortage of prospective clients out there, just a shortage of hours in the day for you to execute. Qualifying an opportunity properly has never been more important, and it is a giant mistake to pursue business you cannot win. Beyond your personal integrity, treasure your time above everything else.
The Power of Truly Listening
Listening is the most powerful form of influence. It draws the other person toward you, it shows them you believe they are the most important person in the conversation, it builds empathy, it demonstrates your values and positive intent, it earns you the right to ask questions, and it helps them believe that you understand them and what they need.
You learn nothing while you’re speaking. Worse still, pushing your message creates resistance. Whether you are online on social platforms or face-to-face, you should adopt an attract-and-engage strategy rather than trying to project your message. Everyone should seek to understand before expecting to be understood.
Professor Neil Rackham did the first genuinely sound academic research into professional selling back in the 1980s. He was transparent in the way his team gathered data in the field and also in how the results were assessed. Never before or since has there been research with this level of integrity. Every salesperson should read the initial book published as a result, SPIN Selling. Dozens of researchers observed more than 35,000 face-to-face sales calls spanning 12 years. SPIN is an acronym for Situation, Problem, Implication, and Value or Benefit. SPIV or SPIB did not seem to roll of the tongue so Neil went with Need-Payoff. It’s not a sales methodology but rather a timelessly brilliant questioning framework.
There were many insights published from the analysis, but this stands out above everything else: The top 10 percent of performers spoke only one-third as much as the bottom 90 percent. This means that high performers in sales and business are excellent listeners. But in the same way that there are modes of questioning (open or closed) and different types of questions (fact-based, problem-based, implication-based, and benefit-based), there are also different modes of listening:
Selective (husbands are renowned for this)
Passive (think of teenagers grunting in reply while clicking away on social media)
Responsive (providing detached feedback like a counselor or psychologist)
Active (fully engaged and invested with empathy and emotion)
Active listening is the best mode for sales and naturally opens the door for asking open questions where issues are explored and understanding is confirmed. Skilled listeners communicate sincere interest through positive eye contact, and they avoid distracting the other person with fidgeting or interrupting except with clarifying questions.
Bill Clinton is legendary in his ability to make a person feel valued by holding eye contact, nodding, and asking questions. He knows how to make the other person feel like the most important person in the room. Many loved him for it and voted accordingly.
Strategic Selling in the Real World
In my first book, I focused on how to win large complex opportunities, selling to the enterprise. It explained my RSVPselling methodology, which has been used to win hundreds of millions of dollars in business by understanding and managing the four key elements for winning a deal: Relationships with the right people, Strategy for navigating the politics and overcoming competition, creating Value as defined by the customer, and Process alignment to ensure that the evaluation, selection, and procurement processes work in your favor.
The RSVP framework simply requires you to ask yourself these questions:
Relationships: Do you have the right relationships? Followed by: Are you selling at the right level, and does your target have real political and economic power? Do your relationships provide differentiating intelligence, insight, and genuine influence?
Strategy: Do you have an effective strategy for managing relationships and competitive threats? Followed by: Do you understand the power base, and have you identified the competition (external and internal, including the risk of them doing nothing)? What’s your strategy for winning while engineering a positive bias in the customer’s requirements toward you?
Value: Are you leading with insight and uniquely creating compelling business value in the eyes of the customer? Followed by: Why will they buy anything at all, and is there a risk of the status quo prevailing? How are you differentiating and evidencing our credentials as lowest risk and best value?
Process: Are you aligned and do you truly understand the customer’s process for evaluation, selection, approval, and procurement? Followed by: Do you understand how they define and assess risk with suppliers and solutions? Do you have a close plan validated by the customer?
Excellence in execution underpins the four RSVP elements with pragmatic tools for qualifying, closing, and understanding the players in the buyer organization. Ideally, all of this resides within your CRM.
The most important element in strategic selling is to find the puppet master, the orchestrator of change, the pinnacle of the power base. This is essential because you must have a strong personal relationship with the person who can successfully drive change within the customer organization. Doing this is the foundation of strategic selling. Be wary of investing in long sales cycles if you are denied access to power.
Although this book focuses on how to build top-of-funnel sales pipeline, the RSVP principles remain relevant even at the earliest phases of engaging with a potential customer. This is because the initial entry point into an account and the value narrative you use to set the agenda have a huge bearing on the eventual size of the opportunity and probability of success. Engaging strategically demands understanding of the customer’s value drivers. It demands that you bring your own hypothesis of value, which is a relevant perspective that you take to the customer that causes them to rethink their situation.
Operating strategically is defined by being proactive, researching, targeting, planning, and engaging at the right levels (see Figure 2-3); it involves going through the right channels at the right time based upon trigger events or contextual relevance. The best sellers seek alignment with the ideal prospective customers rather than attempting to raise the dead through evangelism. The way they achieve this is by focusing on win reviews with their best customers to identify the triggers that caused the customers to invest in a solution (kudos Craig Elias, Tibor Shanto, and Cian McLoughlin). There is a very important distinction here: It is not about discovering why a customer bought from you over the competition; it’s instead about identifying trigger events that caused them to decide they had a serious problem or opportunity that started them on their journey of discovery about who to invest with.
FIGURE 2-3. STRATEGIC SELLING DEFINED
Salespeople are wired to behave as if closing the sale is the end of what matters, but for the customer, it’s where the risk begins. Buyers want a supplier who cares about delivering the outcomes they are seeking. Customer experience (CX) is the new sales model for driving sustainable competitive advantage. Sellers who take the time to do post-implementation reviews with ROI validation are the ones who generate the most powerful case studies and testimonials. They also use that process to identify trigger events and profile the ideal new dream client.
But there is another magical approach to creating ultimate buyer empathy, insight, and alignment—it’s the power of thinking about your customer’s customer. Business to business to customer (B2B2C) is what you need to focus on. If it’s possible for you to actually become a customer, then you should do that and document the experience. The sellers who think deeply and care greatly about their client’s challenges and opportunities earn the right conversations because they can discuss how to help reduce costs, gain market share, reduce customer churn, improve customer satisfaction, and more. These are the sellers who change the rules on the competition through the way they sell. It demands that you go vertically deep in industry segments, and it requires substantial investment—this is where insight selling, or Challenger ideas, occur.
Real differentiation happens in the way that selling occurs rather than in what is actually being sold. The way you sell has always been more important than what you sell, and CEB Research has proven this. The very best prepare fully, arrive early, and engage at the most senior levels. They challenge the status quo with evidenced business insights while setting an agenda with an inbuilt bias toward their strengths. Finally, they embed their unique value in a compelling business case to overcome apathy and the status quo. They use risk as a weapon and fear as a positive motivator to find best value. They create a strong focus on business value creation and risk mitigation while aligning with those who have genuine power within the political power base structure.
You can tell whether a salesperson is selling strategically by the type of conversations they have with the buyer (see Figure 2-3). If the focus is on product, price, features, functions, or competition, then the seller is engaging at the wrong level. Those things are usually used to exclude the seller from the game; they are rarely the reasons that the customer buys.
In addition to all of this, you need to combine old school with new school by embracing the best of the social selling concepts, especially leveraging the power of LinkedIn. The term social selling can be a misnomer because in the context of B2B sales, most of the activity is actually social monitoring, social research, and social marketing. The smart operators avoid digital spamming and instead use proven old-school methods accelerated by new-school social platforms to deliver improved leverage, scale, and reach. Here are the most important aspects of strategic social selling, which culminates in using the phone to actually call. All social selling supports the phone call because social and the phone together are supremely powerful.
FIGURE 2-4. SALES ENGAGEMENT MODES
Social Selling Framework Defined
You could easily form the view that I am against social selling, but the opposite is the case. I have been a huge proponent of a modernized approach and have been exhorting old dogs learning new tricks for years. I jumped on the social selling bandwagon with evangelical enthusiasm back in 2013, but I became horrified once I saw sellers using it as an excuse to become insanely passive and avoid the phone.
Here is my definition of social selling, published back in early 2014: “The strategy and process of building quality networks online to attract clients and accelerate the speed of business and efficiency of selling. It is achieved with personal human engagement through social listening, social publishing, social research, social engagement, and social collaboration.”
In my definition, technology is merely an enabler but can be leveraged to create truly incredible results with the right strategies. Social initiatives may be driven and supported by the use of technology and platforms, but they have always been about real human connection and interaction. This is what actually provides memorable value through insight or assistance with relevant content and conversations. The big mistake I made with the infographic shown in Figure 2-5 was having no emphasis on the phone—the original social selling tool! Here is a summary of the elements of strategic social selling.
FIGURE 2-5. STRATEGIC SOCIAL SELLING
Social Research: Social research with social monitoring will allow you to understand the precise moment when to strike. Passively monitoring the leads in the top accounts in your territory will bear fruit. You’ll start to notice patterns in what your prospects are posting that will influence the insights you can share. You’ll start to notice a near unanimous consensus about challenges and strategic objectives. The differentiators in your suite of solutions will emerge.
Social Listening/Monitoring: The most powerful trigger events to monitor are changes and transitions. Are you segmenting and targeting your ideal buyers and putting feelers out to filter their signals from the noise? This can be done with tools such as HootSuite and TweetDeck. I’m surprised at how few sellers are creating basic Twitter Lists, which allow you to listen by segments to 25 individuals or fewer who are actually practical to track. You must first open your ears, heart, and mind. Be present and make sure that you have a dashboard set up to glean every aspect of what your dream prospects are putting out into the social ether: press releases, white papers, reflections on the annual report, interviews, YouTube videos (subscribe to their channel), tweets, Facebook shares, Google+ updates, LinkedIn Sales Navigator updates, Pinterest boards, Instagram pictures, and SlideShare. You can also set up Google Alerts.
Social Publishing: What you write and what you share shows people who you are, what you believe, and what you value. Few people write well, and this is of itself a huge opportunity for you to differentiate. Take the plunge on LinkedIn Publisher/Pulse by publishing articles that show your insights and your values. In nonselling time, share your subject-matter expertise and thought leadership. The second huge way to amp up your social publishing is to get in front of as many qualified buyers as you can to understand the issues and insights most important to them. Start to compile a list of links as you peruse the Internet so that you can reference and link to them in your posts.
Becoming a social publisher is more about overcoming fear than anything else. If you got into a career in sales because brevity is your strong suit and you love picking up the phone and talking with clients—well, you’re probably already a top producer. I would suggest writing in LinkedIn as if you’re writing a letter to your biggest client to explain how your solution solves their challenge. You’ll notice you write volumes of emails every day sharing your hard-won expertise and insight. Carry that intensity and authentic voice into social publishing. The fastest way to build compelling posts is with mash-ups or hijacking current events (“newsjack” is the term used by David Meerman Scott). Pick a current event or a sport you know about and mix it with some business rules: For example, write an intriguing post based on your real-world experience with bingo. Do this in your own time at night or on weekends. More on this later when I discuss building your platform.
Social Engagement: This is all about subtlety. Blasting updates with your Twitter handle can and will hurt you. Poorly worded connection requests or InMails will cause a crickets response. Engagement has to be meaningful for your prospects, not just formulaic and self-serving for you. You must move away from interesting and toward interested to move up the ladder of engagement. It’s best to slowly warm up prospects from a simmer to a roaring boil. Then the phone becomes the tip of the arrow for engagement that hits the mark! It is also important to be where your buyers are online. Thoughtfully like, comment, and share their content, but never jump in and sell. Simply become known so that you can make a warm call with the right context.
Social Collaboration: This is all about efficiency in working with your team, ecosystem, and customer. It’s amazing what happens once you start to form digital bonds with a super network that can enable your success. This applies within your own organization and out in the marketplace. Actively use tools such as Salesforce Chatter, Yammer, or others within your CRM. Also, attract thought leaders and bloggers in vertical industries, and join mastermind groups. Participate in your target market’s social hangouts as you build a virtual network to brainstorm and become a mastermind yourself.
Your social selling efforts need to focus on monitoring your targets and finding a way to make warm calls. Personal brand is also essential—more on this later. Let’s now explore why opening with business case value is so important.
Building a Winning Business Case
Opening the door, landing on the beach, securing that initial meeting. These are musts; but no one is going to buy something substantial without having a business case. Never forget that your decision-makers, the people in real power, are constantly wondering:
Why should we change when what we’re doing still works?
Why should we invest money in this area compared with other priorities?
What is the cost of current state, and does it really outweigh the cost of change?
What are the risks, and how will they be managed?
Can we really trust this person to deliver for us?
Your role as a salesperson is to inspire someone to see a better future and change state. But for them to secure agreement and approval internally means they must achieve consensus and have a compelling business case. The language of business is numbers, and every leader wants tangible, measurable results. They also want someone “on the hook” for managing the risks and successfully delivering.
Before we dive into the elements of a business case, let’s be crystal clear about the most important factor. You must show exactly how any benefit will monetize and drop to their bottom line. Avoid the fluff and compliance arguments as drivers of a business case. Things such as improved staff morale, better brand recognition, or adherence to standards are as weak as water. Instead, lead with screamingly strong financial results that will be achieved and have proof of why the numbers are valid, how progress will be measured, and how risks will be managed. The enemy is their apathy, so lead with your knockout punch rather than dancing around, poking and prodding, hoping for a reaction.
Commercial enterprises are driven by profit, which is achieved with a combination of margin and volume. Margin is the result of deducting costs from the selling price. Volume is a function of market size and market share. There is room for only a limited number of generalists in any sector, and that is why most companies specialize. Successful companies therefore have business models focused on either low volume with high margin or high volume with low margin. Think about Coca-Cola (high volume) compared with Boeing (high margin) as simplistic examples.
If a business is seeking to improve margins, then it increases its selling price or reduces its costs (COGS: cost of goods sold). If, on the other hand, a business is seeking to increase volume, then this is achieved by gaining more market share or accessing new markets. You must therefore help customers to reduce costs or increase prices through value, or you must help them increase market share or gain access to previously untapped markets. Cost-cutting is a tactic, not a strategy, and no organization can cost-cut its way to long-term success. A final consideration is the cost of acquiring new customers, and it is far more cost-effective to invest in retaining existing clients than replacing those lost due to poor service or failure to provide adequate value or great customer experience. When you seek to sell at the very top in a commercial environment, you must align your value with their focus and business drivers.
In addition to business drivers, you also need to consider an organization’s level of urgency and motivation to solve problems or realize opportunities. Organizations in either high growth or crisis/survival mode will make decisions quickly, but if an organization is in business-as-usual mode, decisions will be slow. Any business in survival mode is desperate to reduce costs and improve cash flow (not to be confused with profit). A business experiencing high growth, on the other hand, will be driven to increase profit and achieve greater efficiencies. The problem with selling to a business that is maintaining the status quo (business as usual) is that it can easily do nothing and defer investment decisions. Although it wants improved profitability, through greater efficiency and reduced costs, it struggles with investing and can move so slowly that decision momentum is lost completely through endless analysis.
The lesson in all this is that you need serious problems or opportunities in order to create compelling value for the client. Seek organizations that are growing or, depending on what you offer, are in crisis. Beware of prospective clients who are comfortable and have the option of simply doing nothing.
Government and charitable organizations are not driven by profit. Instead, they are focused on achieving outcomes. These not-for-profit organizations either want to improve service value (efficiency and service levels) or to increase service volume (the number of people or organizations utilizing their products or services). When you seek to sell at the very top in government or charitable environments, you must also align your value with their drivers and metrics for performance measurement.
You must help them increase efficiency and improve productivity or you must help them to cost-effectively increase the reach (or capability) and utilization of their services. In essence, the drivers are almost always to improve compliance and service levels or to operate more efficiently. Beware of any government employee, however, telling you that their business case is compliance alone. The very top people see compliance as a relatively low-level “tick in the box” issue and will not allocate serious funding in isolation. Compliance may be a driver for some, but it is never a business case alone. Compliance outcomes must be the by-product of investing in improved efficiency and service levels. This is not to say that return on investment (ROI) cannot exist in nonmonetary terms, but treat these things as a bonus of the financial business case—a cherry on the top.
The concept of COMBO applies to building a business case because there are different types of return on investment and every industry has its own metrics that drive the way they manage. In retail businesses, for example, they care about how many times they can turn stock on the shelves in a month to improve return on working capital. Services businesses care about the utilization of their billable people as a measure of profitability per person. SaaS businesses care about renewals and churn to build their compounding recurring revenue, which is critical for company valuation. These are examples of compelling business case drivers that feed directly into bottom-line profit:
Increased revenue
Increased market share
Improved margins
Improved efficiencies (more output with the same resources)
Reduced costs
Reduced customer churn (better client retention)
“Second order,” or less quantifiable, benefits are important as they create strong emotional connections to drive change and can include:
Improved customer satisfaction
Improved staff engagement
Greater compliance
Improved brand
Improved investor relationships
Better community engagement
These two categories of benefits could be characterized as targeting the head versus the heart. Every organization is a collective of uniquely different people who have their own personal needs, priorities, and agendas. Ideally, these should be aligned with the organization, but this is not always the case. Internal politics, restructuring, takeovers, retrenchments, and career changes are common. These are all trigger events you must become masterful at monitoring using social!
Honoring the law of self-interest is also important. A person in the buying center or power base of an organization may be in either a negative/conservative mode or in a positive/ambitious mode. The motivations of individuals are either positive or negative, depending on their personal situation within the enterprise. Their motivations may include:
Seeking to protect their position or reputation versus wanting to look good and being a leader or hero
Avoiding mistakes and maintaining control versus receiving recognition or earning a promotion
Avoiding conflict and stress versus being an agent for change
Saving money and reducing costs versus driving revenues and productivity
Your approach when prospecting needs to be sensitive to all of these factors, and this is why you need humility and inquisitiveness as you position your hypothesis of value. An individual does not function in a vacuum; they are part of an organization that will have certain business drivers that influence all decisions. People drive agendas and decisions, and they always have an emotional favorite they would like to see win their business. It is essential therefore to understand and align with both personal agendas and corporate drivers so that you are the emotional favorite.
Every commercial enterprise is driven by a need to increase profit, and most government organizations are driven by a desire to improve service through efficiency and effectiveness. Ideally, these outcomes are achieved without increasing costs or exposure to unacceptable risk. In essence, there is a universal desire to achieve more with less, and any value narrative, proposal, or business case should focus on greater output (or more revenue) from existing resources (achieving greater productivity) or less cost or effort (resulting in better efficiency).
The pace of business, decision urgency, and how you are prioritized is determined by the organization’s operating mode and individual priorities. It is vitally important to understand which business mode and personal agendas are in play when seeking to drive a sale. This is why social research, social listening, and trigger events are critically important as you decide where to invest your precious time in pipeline-building activities. Alignment is key, and the mix of variables can be quite complex. But there is another element of complexity—politics operate in every organization, and consensus needs to be achieved before implementing change.
Engineering Consensus
The best salespeople are engineers of value rather than mere warriors of persuasion. They know how to engage leaders. The reality today is that most executives in the customer’s organization are not secure. Behind their well-groomed smiling facade of power, they all secretly lay awake at night worrying if they will be found out, blindsided by a scandal, damaged by market forces they cannot control, or executed from above on the notion that they’ve reached their use-by date. Politics abound as people smile up and push the crap down.
The result is that even if the boss can autocratically pronounce a sweeping change for the organization, they’re smart enough not to do it. They know that they need consensus and must take their team and the greater organization on the journey. If they fail to do so, then the initiative can be scuttled, stillborn, or white-anted all the way to failure. As you target an organization for your pipeline-building activities, you must start at the highest practical level. This will be the person who truly owns the problem or opportunity at a profit and loss (P & L) level, and they will have the power to say “no” to any proposal that affects their area. You must start there, with the CEO of the problem, and then be sponsored down and across to engineer consensus and a compelling business case.
Traditional wisdom has been for salespeople to hunt down the influencers, recommenders, and decision-makers to tailor their value pitch based on role and agenda. That’s a valid approach, but increasingly today it is not enough because of organizational politics, competing agendas, and misaligned priorities within the buying organization. The problem of decision commitment is that as you add more and more people to the evaluation, selection, and procurement process, the probability of stalemate increases.
According to CEB Research, the number of buyers needed to achieve consensus for a decision is approximately seven (I highly recommend that you read The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer).9 But the problem is even worse than it looks because instead of dealing with seven people, you are increasingly dealing with seven groups of people! These groups can include evaluation committees, project boards, and steering committees, not to mention those who lead the areas of economic, user experience, technical, financial, and line of business.
The cost of sale in targeting enterprise and government is going up at the same time that savvy buyers are commoditizing the seller’s offering to drive prices and margins down. This is why it is critically important to open with the right value narrative and make sure the conversation is with exactly the right person who can sponsor and secure consensus for change.
Creating alignment around the need for change, which is supported by a compelling business case, is the key to sales success. Our prospecting dialogue needs to anchor this right from the very beginning. Here is another example of an effective opening: The executive prospect asks, “What do you want from meeting with me?” You reply, “If you believe what we discuss is worth exploring further, then I’ll need you to introduce me to your teams so I can work with them to build a business case. Both our teams will need to invest some time as the next step from there.”
Engineering consensus happens when you are sponsored into the organization by the leader. Then you can begin to understand all the issues and collaboratively build a business case with their team that documents and evidences the cost of inaction versus the tangible benefits of change. The focus of the seller is not to make a sale but to help the buying team identify potential value and build the case for change with implementation plans that manage any risks. The opening focus should not be about your product but rather about their business case—even if it is not yet conceived, you can be the twinkle in their eye.
Opening Is the New Closing
“Opening is the new closing,” says Anthony Iannarino. I often ask senior executives what they think the biggest weakness is within their sales team. A common answer is that their salespeople need to be better closers. But here is the thing I’ve learned from three decades in the trenches: The perceived problem is rarely the real problem—inability to close is usually a symptom of deeper issues. The way you open a relationship has greater bearing on success than how you close the deal.
In both complex enterprise selling and simple (or transactional) selling (lower value and usually a single decision-maker), there is a universal truth that must be embraced if you are to improve results: Opening is far more important than closing because it is where the agenda is set, trust is established, and understanding is created. The way you initiate and build the relationship, along with your understanding, largely determines the likelihood of success.
The critical issues in opening are:
Selecting the correct role to engage within the customer organization
Creating a conversation that provides value (through insights) for that person
Finding a way to positively break through their barriers
A common mistake in selling is to engage with the people you feel would be easiest to access and with whom you could carry the conversation. Outsourced lead generation providers and inside sales SDRs also suffer from the tendency to operate at mid-levels of the buying organization. Inbound leads are even worse because they often come from recommenders and researchers who act for others. These people are keen to obtain information but can quickly become blockers who seek to deny you access to real decision-makers. You must carefully select the right entry point into every account and opportunity, knowing the person will be difficult to reach . . . but that’s where COMBO comes into its own.
As a sidenote, if you are already engaged at the wrong level and struggling to elevate your conversations in an account, these questions can earn you the right to go higher:
What’s the business outcome this initiative has to deliver within the business case?
What are the biggest risks in this project and what’s your strategy to manage them?
What’s your approach to ensure stakeholder buy-in and manage change?
These questions also set the right agenda when engaging a real decision-maker because leaders care about delivering results and managing risk. The business case and change management issues always figure highly in their thinking once they’re interested in the future-state vision that has been set.
We have previously discussed creating conversations of value and insight for the targeted CXO, but just in case you are tempted to lapse: No senior leader worth engaging is initially interested in you, your company, or your products, services, and solutions. They instead care about their own results, stakeholders, and career. Although you are wired to talk about yourself, you must instead lead with why a conversation should matter to the other person. You can create conversations of insight and value by truly understanding your best customers and the disruptive market trends that are relevant to your new potential clients.
If you are seeking to engage the CXO in an existing client, simply call them and say that you are not happy with the level of value they are getting for the relationship with your company. Go on and say that you know they are seeking to drive greater value from fewer suppliers, and you have some ideas on how they could do that very thing. This absolutely works—make the call now!
Open in a way that separates you from everyone else, and be positively memorable in how you engage. If you can be the one who obsessively focuses on business outcomes and delivering results for the client, you’ll be invited into the C-suite and become their emotional favorite. They’ll open up and allow you to help with their business case and design the process for evaluating and selecting the right solution and managing change internally. It can happen—sellers really can become trusted advisers. As part of earning that right, build a strong personal brand evidencing credibility, insight, influence, value, and integrity.