11   

Delivering the Message

Essential Skills for the Expansion Seller

Have you ever ordered something online, only to have the box arrive at your home dented and torn? You nervously peel back the tape and peek inside, hoping your item hasn’t been damaged. And if it is, even if the manufacturer sends a replacement, all the initial excitement and enthusiasm around your initial purchase has dissipated. The entire experience falls flat.

The same concept applies to your customer conversations. You can construct a scientifically sound, persuasive message that you’re excited about, but if you don’t deliver it the right way, it loses much of its power. Just as you need different messages to connect with customers during these different commercial moments, you need to use different skills to communicate those messages.

The key is to execute these skills within the context of each message framework. Just as you need to apply the right message at the right moment, you also need to apply the most effective skill to communicate that specific element of the message.

DOCUMENTING RESULTS

Whether you’re in a Why Stay, a Why Pay More, or a Why Evolve conversation, your first step remains the same: You need to document the results and successes the customer has achieved by working with you. That means first and foremost knowing your customers’ goals. And not only knowing the goals, but how your customers measure their progress against them. Ultimately, you need to measure how your solution helped your customers get closer to (or achieve) those goals than they ever would have otherwise.

As noted earlier in this book, it might be difficult to get this information from your customers. Sometimes they don’t track it consistently. Sometimes they won’t want to share it. And too often, they simply don’t know what the metrics are or where to go in their organizations to find them.

That’s one of your earliest opportunities to start establishing your Incumbent Advantage. If your customers truly don’t know what to track or how to track it, why not tell them? Sit down with them during the sales process and help them determine what success will look like for them and develop a mechanism for tracking it. After all, you’ve sold your solution many more times than your customers have purchased it. Who better to advise them on what they should expect?

One helpful framework for documenting results is something we call the “Triple Metric” (Figure 11.1). Using this framework helps ensure you’re tracking results that are meaningful to the person you’re meeting with but that also link to results your senior-most customer stakeholder cares about, on three levels:

•   Corporate. How will your solution support your customer’s highest-level performance measurements—the goals you might find in your customer’s management presentation or shareholder letter? Think of measures like increases in revenue or improved cash flow.

•   Business Unit. How will your solution help your customer create business or operational change at the department level, and how do those changes then ladder up to the “corporate” metrics? Metrics such as productivity, employee engagement, or win rates will be critical here.

•   Project. How will your solution help your customer achieve the tactical changes necessary to support the overall goals of the department? These are the metrics most sales and customer success teams know and love—completing projects on time and on budget and meeting service-level agreements.

Figure 11.1 Use the Triple Metric to ensure you’re tracking results that are meaningful to the person you’re meeting with, as well as to the broader organization.

The key here is to collaborate with your prospects during the initial sale to identify their desired outcomes and come up with meaningful, yet achievable measurement criteria. And even if you didn’t own the initial sale, or the customers bought without a clear measure of how your solution could impact those corporate goals, there’s no time like the present to start identifying those key outcomes in collaboration with your customers.

As you start documenting results for your expansion conversation, begin with the challenges they were trying to solve when they first started talking to you. What goals did they talk about? When completing this step, make sure you include these three points:

•   What was their previous situation? How were they operating before they purchased your solution?

•   What were they able to “do” differently as a result of your solution? Here you want to document concrete actions they were able to take, such as changes in specific processes.

•   What did that “mean” to them from a financial or business impact perspective? In other words, what was the value they achieved? The closer that value is to what your senior buyers care about, the better.

And that’s often the biggest challenge for expansion sellers and customer success teams—elevating customer value back up to the most senior stakeholders that signed off on the initial purchase. There is immense comfort of day-to-day metrics and reporting at the project level of the Triple Metric. You probably have a customer scorecard or dashboard, a monthly status meeting, or a project update forum. Look hard at the measures that you bring to those meetings. How many are about how your company is performing? How many are about what your company has achieved? Documenting that you’ve hit your 99.8 percent uptime SLA or that your trains are running on time (for lack of a better cliché) does little, if anything, to prove what your customers are doing differently because of your solution.

That’s where the connective tissue of the Triple 141Metric must come into play. Don’t get us wrong—you’ll often need to report those project-level metrics. It’s likely baked into your contract. Your job in documenting results is to link those project metrics to department outcomes and ultimately to corporate goals. If that connection doesn’t exist or is unclear to your customers, your results lose power. The more your conversations anchor on corporate goals, with verifiable outcomes against those goals, you won’t merely start your message successfully. You’ll keep the ongoing attention of the senior buyers that will need to sign off on that renewal, price increase, or expansion sale.

Once you’ve collected all the information and made those connection points, your next step is to bring it to life in your conversation. That means framing the results in a way that grabs and holds your customers’ attention. There are a few ways to do this, but when you’re documenting results, the two most effective ways are through techniques called Number Plays and Customer Stories with Contrast.

1.   Number Plays. This technique involves sharing a series of numbers (usually three) that build into a single story. The most effective Number Plays share information the customers didn’t already know—or create a new insight they had not previously considered.

When developing a Number Play, first identify the main point you want to make. For example, if you want to draw attention to cost reduction over time, you might want to use numbers to represent the amount of time they’ve worked with you, the percentage decrease in costs over that period, and the hard dollar savings they’ve realized.

Number Plays are best delivered in writing, on a flip chart or whiteboard. If you happen to be meeting with your customers over the phone or the web, try having them write the numbers as you dictate. In either case, share the numbers first—just the numbers, with no indication of what they represent. Then, as you tell the story, fill in the labels to build the story:

22, 12, and 4. <WRITE numbers> These numbers tell a story. Reducing costs is often painful, but not in this case. In the 22 months <WRITE “Months”> you’ve partnered with us, you’ve been able to measure a 12 percent <WRITE “%”> reduction in electricity use. This reduction translates into direct savings of over 4 million. <WRITE “Million” and DRAW country-relevant currency sign>

Cost reduction efforts are more successful when everyone gets the mandate and the objective is broader than just next quarter’s earnings. Making a strong case to all stakeholders—nationally, internationally, and with your union workforces—requires you to convey urgency and criticality.

These initial results make the case to evolve further, and that’s what you’re going to hear about today: how to get everyone aligned around further reducing your third-highest cost line-item—energy.

Tip: Don’t quiz your customers by asking them if they know what the numbers mean after you write them. They won’t—and asking will only frustrate them. And if they can guess, you don’t have an attention-grabbing Number Play.

2.   Customer Stories with Contrast. Another way to bring your results to life is to create contrast in the minds of your customers by sharing a “before and after” story about the impact your solution has had on their business. By creating contrast between these two conditions, you establish the perception of value for your customers—and make it concrete and easy for them to understand.

a.   First choose the three key statistics from the Corporate or Business Unit level(s) of the Triple Metric that show the greatest value your customer has received by working with you (efficiency gains, reduction in costs, increase in accuracy, reduction in manual interventions, increase in throughput, or similar metrics).

b.   Next compare these to the customer’s numbers from before they started working with you. For many companies this information does not exist. If you are in this group, you might want to think about implementing a process change to start collecting these key statistics for all new customers. To tell a story with contrast, you need to show where they were historically versus where they are today. The key is to show the journey they’ve taken and all the positive momentum that has been built up.

c.   Finally, identify what changed in the customer’s environment that led to these results.

Ultimately, your story might sound something like this:

Two years ago, when you first partnered with us, you were concerned about rising costs and declining quality. At the time, you were experiencing:

•   200 hours per quarter of unexpected downtime

•   $1.5 million in annual unplanned overtime pay

•   11.2 percent defect rate

You can remember how painful that was, and how it forced you to cut investment in R&D at a time when your major competitors were launching new products every quarter. And that’s why you came to us in the first place—because you knew that if you wanted to stay competitive, you needed to make a change.

Luckily, that change has paid off. Since implementing our solution, you’ve been able to reduce those numbers to:

•   10 hours per quarter of unexpected downtime

•   $12,000 in annual unplanned overtime pay

•   2.1 percent defect rate

These improvements have gone directly to your bottom line, translating into savings of more than $2.5 million—which you’ve reinvested in a new product line that’s scheduled for release in the spring.

Note the specificity in the above example, and how each bullet in the “before” scenario contrasts directly with the corresponding bullet in the “after” scenario. If you were to only focus on the latter scenario, the “after,” you’d only be telling half the story—and you’d miss the opportunity to highlight the value your customer has realized.

It’s also important to understand that “results” don’t always mean “numbers.” You can use both quantitative and qualitative metrics to document results. If you have no hard numbers to share, describe how their business is operating differently. Detail process changes your solution helped them implement. Use stories and anecdotes to illustrate their progress (“In our last conversation, you mentioned that employee engagement has gone up since we first started working together . . .”). This forces you to truly know your customer’s organization and have ongoing conversations and interactions so you can pick up on individual successes and broader customer sentiment around your solution.

The more concrete your examples, the more your customers will see themselves in them.

VISUAL STORYTELLING FOR THE EXPANSION SALE

So you’ve learned how to share important information with your customers in a memorable way through Number Plays and Customer Stories with Contrast. But even those techniques might not be enough to ensure long-term retention of your message. In fact, research shows that only 1 hour after you share your message with customers, they’ll only remember 50 percent of what you said. If that wasn’t depressing enough, after 8 hours retention drops to 25 percent, and after 24 hours retention drops to only 10 percent. In other words, one day after you speak with someone, the person will have forgotten 90 percent of what you said. And you thought your customer was excited to talk with you!

A good way to see if this is a problem with your existing customers is to listen to the questions they ask during your follow-up calls and meetings. When you have these conversations, do you hear questions like, “Where did we leave off last time? Tell me again what the purpose of this meeting is? What were we talking about?”

Those of you in customer success are likely vigorously nodding along right now. Too often, that’s how your typical monthly check-in calls begin. You’re ready to share the latest adoption statistics, and your customer is asking what you talked about during the last call. It’s once more an always-on fight between your message and your customer’s brain.

How do you fight this forgetting cycle, where you share, your customer forgets, and then you share again? There’s one scientific principle that will make you six times more memorable to your customer. The same principle will also help your customer remember your message six times longer. The principle is the “Picture Superiority Effect”: When you combine your words with an image, your story will be more memorable.

And the good news is, the concept has been around for a while. Humans have communicated through pictures long before the spoken word, and yet too many customer conversations rely solely on the spoken word to convey critical business points. Even with the right message for the right commercial moment, without a complementary visual, marketers, sellers, and customer success teams are limiting their own effectiveness and squandering their most potent, built-in advantage.

Think of all the work that often precedes a single prospect meeting—marketing touches galore, cold calls, warm e-mails—all to get a seller one shot at delivering a compelling message.

The expansion meeting is a completely different ball game. You likely have standing appointments with your key customer contacts. You’ve scheduled quarterly business reviews with senior stakeholders at your largest accounts. You’re having that always-on Why Stay conversation to reinforce the status quo. In other words, it’s the ideal time to leverage the Picture Superiority Effect to solidify your Incumbent Advantage.

Do a quick comparison with your competitor, which desperately is trying to dislodge you. Let’s say the people at your competitor haven’t read this book, and don’t use a visual in the one conversation they have. Your customer remembers little of the competitor’s presentation. On your side, you ensure every standing meeting occurs. You prepare a simple visual for each one, often co-creating in the moment with your customer. Through visuals alone, you are exponentially building a competitive defense in your customer’s mind. Your customer remembers more of your meetings, finds more value in your meetings, and thus takes and attends more meetings—and your status quo becomes firmer each time.

As you build your expansion visual, keep the following principles in mind (and refer to the examples in the Appendix for further inspiration):

1.   Paint a world in which your customers will see themselves. If your visual doesn’t resonate with your customers, it will not have the impact you need. You don’t have to perfectly visualize their world, but it needs to be familiar enough that they can put themselves in the visual. Here your bar is high. Your customers expect a current partner to know this world. Visualizing it cleanly for them is an implicit signal that you “get it.”

In contrast, it cannot be your world. Avoid the temptation to portray your solutions. This is not a technical drawing showing how your solution specifically works. As wonderful as your offerings are, this isn’t about you.

2.   Start with their thinking. Envision how your customers see their world today. What problems and issues are top of mind? Now compare that with the contrast you need them to see. What’s the difference? How can you visualize these two different states?

3.   Keep it simple. Too many visuals overcomplicate the scenario. You’re not creating an infographic—you’re developing a memory tool to engage customers on a deeper level and help them remember and share your story more broadly across their organization. A good rule of thumb: If your customers saw your visual and heard you talk through it, could they retell that story three days later?

4.   Include contrast. Recall that contrast is the key element to overcoming Selection Difficulty, and the best contrast shows the difference between loss and gain. Loss aversion continues to be your friend in your visual. When you include clear contrast in your visual, you make it much easier for the customers to make a decision. You can show the whole journey the customers need to take and increase the likelihood they’ll follow your lead.

The contrast you demonstrate needs to differ based on the commercial moment that you’re in. A Why Stay visual will look different from a Why Evolve visual—and both will look different from a Why Change visual. This is exceptionally important for sellers with a book of business that spans all selling scenarios. As you read in earlier chapters, using the wrong message—and supporting it with the wrong visual—can ruin your opportunity for commercial success. For example, in a Why Stay visual, you want to show contrast between everything your customer has achieved and the risks or costs of doing something different. In a Why Evolve visual, you need to incorporate enough nuance to contrast the current approach, which to some degree is good, with the risks or costs of not making any change.

Picture superiority is a well-tested and well-documented science, but there was one big question associated with the concept: What type of picture is best? In storytelling, you have many ways to visualize your story, but which type is scientifically the most persuasive and effective?

This big question prompted original research conducted with Dr. Zakary Tormala, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, who was contracted by Corporate Visions to conduct this experiment. The strategy in testing was to remove all variables except for the visual. Participants heard a single audio track with the same speaker saying the same words. While the talk track was identical, the visual they saw on the screen was different.

•   One-third of participants saw a traditional PowerPoint slide with building bullets and a little stock photography.

•   One-third of participants were presented with a whole screen image of a single picture with a few words on the page.

•   One-third of participants saw a hand-drawn visual created on the screen.

In the testing, the hand-drawn visual won in all six categories tested (Figure 11.2). Of these, the credibility question was particularly interesting. The speaker in the hand-drawn condition was perceived as more credible than the others, even though everyone got the exact same message with the exact same audio track.

The feedback from the field reinforces these findings. People who adopt the hand-drawn visual approach will often say, “Customers are so much more engaged . . . It was the best meeting I ever had.” From a customer perspective, comments are often “You really know your stuff” or “You’ve really shaped my thinking on this.”

Figure 11.2 Use simple, concrete visuals to boost the credibility, memorability, and overall impact of your messages.

The goal is to have an authentic conversation with your customers, which means making it as organic and flexible as possible. This flexibility is important because it invites your customers into the conversation, and in a best-case scenario, they will pick up the pen and start “co-creating” with you.

But what happens if you’re not in the room with them? That’s a phenomenon that is increasingly common. In fact, according to statistics from InsideSales.com, 15475 percent of all selling happens remotely. That includes the 50 percent of sellers who are purely inside, as well as outside sellers who are now conducting half of their sales conversations over the phone.

So how do you flex your powerful visual storytelling skills with a customer who’s halfway around the world, linked to you only by a telephone?

According to a Corporate Visions study, adding an interactive visual to a remote sales conversation produced marked increases in message effectiveness, seller credibility, and information recall.

It makes sense. Think about the last time you heard something you really wanted to remember and understand. Did you just passively listen to the information and expect to retain it? Or did you jot down some notes and reminders?

The same principle holds true for your customers. Our research proved that getting your audience participating in some way—whether by taking notes or drawing a simple, concrete visual as directed—can give you an edge over less interactive approaches. You should be asking what participatory actions your audience can take to amplify and reinforce the story you’re trying to tell.

OWNERSHIP VERSUS PARTNERSHIP IN THE EXPANSION SALE

A recurring theme runs through all the frameworks and techniques you’ve learned so far: Don’t make it about you. Customers care about themselves first, so instead of fighting that fact, go with it and make your story about them.

One of the simplest, yet most powerful, ways to do this is through the language you choose. Using “you-phrasing”—that is, describing challenges and solutions in the second person, from the customer’s perspective—can materially change the way your customers react to your expansion conversations. In many cases, doing this is merely a matter of changing the subject of the sentence from you and your solution to the customers and their results. For example, instead of saying, “Our solution reduced downtime at your plant by 10 percent,” you can say, “You’ve reduced downtime at your plant by 10 percent.” You’ll immediately sound different from your competition, and you will elevate your value and level of trust in the minds of your customers. More importantly, you’re assigning ownership to the customers—ownership of the challenge and risk, so they feel the emotional impact; and ownership of the solution, so they become the “hero.”

In the classic book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell details the typical steps in the “hero’s journey” throughout myth and stories around the world. While the journey is never easy, the role of the “hero” is still desirable. The other key role in Campbell’s model is the “mentor.” A mentor’s job is to counsel and guide the hero in times of struggle.

The two scientific concepts underlying this premise are often referred to as “self-relevance” and “invoking imagination.” Self-relevance is the tendency for people to recall information at a much higher rate when it’s related to themselves. After all, who doesn’t want to be the hero of his or her own story?

In an acquisition conversation, this concept is pretty straightforward. Everyone agrees that customers want to be the hero, and everyone also agrees that the supplier should be the mentor. In fact, when we share this concept with sellers and marketers, they all enthusiastically identify themselves as the mentor. Even though their websites, brochures, and pitch decks are still packed with “vendor-as-hero” language, hey, at least give them credit for having the right idea!

In an expansion conversation, the lines seem a bit blurrier. After all, you’ve just read through a series of message frameworks that urge you to reinforce your status quo as a trusted partner. Wouldn’t that mean, therefore, that you and your customer are taking the hero’s journey together, and that you should convey this through what we call the “inclusive we”—that is, using “we-phrased” statements that convey shared accountability for the challenges and joint ownership of the results? So in the example above, you’d say something like, “Through our partnership, we’ve reduced downtime 10 percent.”

In fact, that’s the primary engagement approach used by a plurality of respondents to a Corporate Visions survey on the topic. Although more than half (52 percent) of the companies we surveyed agreed that you-phrasing should generate better results, a slightly smaller percentage, 47 percent, admitted that they we-phrase their customer communications. What’s more, they do so deliberately, believing it positions them as a trusted partner who brings value and insight to customers.

So are they right?

Not according to the science.

In fact, our research shows that you-phrased messages outperform the inclusive we-phrased messages across every major category tested. In our simulation, participants who received the you-phrased message were:

•   21 percent more likely to feel responsible for solving the problem

•   13 percent more likely to take action

•   9 percent more likely to feel the issue is important to the organization’s future success

To see how these principles come together in a fully articulated expansion story, turn to the Appendix. Then use the planners provided to begin building your own messages.