CHAPTER 11
Great Selling: Navigation Skills
We’ve all been there: staring blankly at a vast display of televisions inside a consumer electronics store. So many choices! Are there meaningful differences? Which is the right one for me? How do I get the most value for my money? How do I make the right decision? Will I make the right decision? Looking at web reviews on my phone, I still find it impossible to determine the best option for me. Maybe it’s just easier to go home and deal with this another time.
This quandary is not just a situation in which consumers find themselves. Businesses face the same circumstances every day. Even for major purchases, businesses today are confronting an unexpected wealth of choices. From the point of view of the various sellers offering their products and services to the company, there may be important differentiators and multiple levels of value. But to the people in the company making the buying decision, the choice can feel much the same as the consumer facing that wall of televisions.
As salespeople, we often think of ourselves presenting a great product or solution to the customer. But customers see this completely differently. They see too many choices without clear differentiators. At some point it becomes easiest to just make a choice based on price. No one will question that.
Becoming the Salesperson that Customers Seek
The research that BTS has conducted with 638 buyers globally shows that customers do not want to make their purchase decision just based on price. What they want are salespeople who will help them make the right choice that maximizes the overall value equation.
Constant change and uncertainty have exhausted buyers; the global economy has made every major purchasing decision seem like life or death. Customers today need salespeople to help reduce complexity and guide them through the chaos on their path from X to Y. While this relationship requires trust, trust alone isn’t enough. Customers want help narrowing down the options and making the right buying decision.
That is why we think it is time to move beyond the concept of becoming the customer’s trusted advisor. The idea of becoming a trusted advisor is about building the right customer relationship defined by credibility, reliability, and intimacy, all with a focus on the customer rather than the salesperson. While still true today, that concept lacks a critical component that customers now expect from salespeople.
Much has been written in recent years about the need for salespeople to provoke or challenge their customers. There’s a lot of truth to that within the trusted advisor concept, particularly when it’s done with genuine humility and curiosity rather than arrogance and condescension. But our research suggests that’s only a piece of the pie, not the entire pie.
What customers today want is a salesperson with navigation skills. They have a destination in mind. Typically, that destination (the vision for Y) is defined by the business goals they want to achieve and the targets they need to hit, as well as the dynamics of their industry. They may or may not know the best path to take, but they will engage with someone they believe will guide them toward that destination. They seek salespeople who understand their industry terrain, can chart new trails based on their individual priorities, and know when to take a shortcut and when it is best to take the long way around. In this view, the successful accelerator salesperson is a navigator.
How to Use Navigation Techniques
Think about what navigators provide on a journey. They have a clear understanding of the desired destination. They know where you want to go. And they have been to that destination before. In fact, they are experts on the multiple ways of getting to that destination. Good navigators know where obstacles lie along the path as well as how to avoid them. They know where the shortcuts exist. More than that, they are also calm and in control, with a clear and compelling vision of how the journey will go.
What does this mean for salespeople? How can you develop navigation skills?
Navigation Skills
As Figure 11.1 shows, navigating the sales journey is a three-step process.
Figure 11.1 Three skills of navigation.
Navigation Step 1: Identify the Destination
First, you have to gain a full understanding of the customer’s intended destination. That destination can be thought of as the customer’s desired result and can be communicated by the customer in multiple ways:
Vision of success
Goals
Metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs)
Becoming an expert on the customer’s desired result means two things: (1) asking the right questions and (2) having sufficient business acumen to understand the answers. It’s one thing to learn that the customer wants to improve inventory turns. But it’s something else to understand why, know what to ask next, and know what to do. By showing customers that you understand their destination and starting point holistically and by making it clear that you are genuinely interested in their results, you begin to earn the right to provide the customer with navigation assistance.
In an environment of customer change, applying navigation skills requires you to fully understand the customer’s vision of the Y destination. Y could be a new go-to-market strategy, a new approach to manufacturing and production, a different way of organizing distribution, or a reorganization of people and reporting structures. It could be a merger integration or a significant product launch. It won’t be hard to figure out what Y is because everyone will be talking about it. What’s a bit harder, but possible with work and the right questions, is deeply understanding the customer’s vision for achieving Y. That takes, in part, familiarity with the metrics that the customer will use to measure the success of Y.
Navigation Step 2: Clarify the Path
The second step for salespeople who want to use navigation skills is to offer expertise along the journey to the destination. That, too, begins with questions. Few customers are standing still, waiting for their journey to begin. Most have already begun the process. So the salesperson must ask questions about what they have done so far and where they have been. This includes topics such as:
Current strategic initiatives
Marketplace trends they are leveraging
Innovations and improvements they are making
Applying navigation techniques also means understanding how the customer organization views the X starting point. There is no path without both X and Y.
Some of the greatest value that salespeople offer is something that most salespeople don’t even recognize: their awareness of how other similar companies are executing. Providing expertise on the journey involves sharing insights about what other companies have discovered along the way. That doesn’t mean sharing anything that is proprietary to those companies, but it does mean saying things like, “Typically, when companies shift their servers to the cloud, they take one of three approaches. Here are the benefits and disadvantages of each approach …”
This is also the time to challenge traditional thinking and offer insights. Many times, great salespeople can highlight what the customer sees as constraints but are actually self-imposed limitations. The salesperson can recommend alternative paths to success that the customer, who is just too close to the day-to-day realities, cannot see. The key to doing this in a way that the customer will appreciate is to be humble: ask questions; offer hypotheses; show empathy.
Next the salesperson has to advise the customer on the path from X to Y. The recommendations should incorporate what the company is already doing and include the steps it should take to get to its results faster. This is when the salesperson begins to talk about products and services. In complex sales, we often recommend that no products or services be discussed in the first two interactions. The first interaction is all about understanding the customer’s desired destination. The second is about the route options. In the third, the salesperson can offer recommendations for the path—a proposal.
The proposal should lay out the way that the sellers’ offerings contribute to the X → XY → Y journey and should include options. It should document the value of defining the XY space and how that will actually accelerate progress toward the Y destination. Typically, the benefits of defining XY are:
Creates a short-term picture of success
Represents a smaller, more manageable increment of change
Reduces resistance to change
Reduces risk
Maintains the commitment to achieving Y in the same time horizon
Chapter 8 provided more detail on describing to customers the advantages of focusing on an XY execution approach.
Navigation Step 3: Measure Progress
Chapter 10 explained how customers today will buy more and at higher prices if by doing so they will genuinely accelerate the achievement of their desired business results. What salespeople often fail to do is to demonstrate progress on the metrics that customers care about. So the journey must include a way of measuring progress on those metrics. More specifically, it must incorporate performance metrics that will be used to measure the purchase’s contributions to X, to Y, and to XY.
In many situations, the salespeople disappear once the sale is closed, handing off the “service” aspect to others in their company. And while the implementation of the purchase almost inevitably requires such a handoff, the best salespeople do not disappear. As customer navigators, they know they must be present at key points throughout the implementation process. Their main role during this stage is to help the customer interpret the progress being made, as well as ensure that any obstacles impeding progress are removed. When progress against the metrics is measured consistently and the original promises from the sales process are being met, salespeople are setting up their next sales. They are uncovering new needs and building trust that they are the right partners.
The right way to navigate at this stage is to assume responsibility for measuring and reporting progress on the journey. That process starts with working collaboratively with customers to determine the metrics to be measured. This is best done during the sales process, incorporated into the proposal, and confirmed at regular intervals. These steps are hugely valuable in creating differentiation between salespeople who are committed to fulfilling the customers’ desired business results and those who are simply there to solve a problem or fill a product need. Salespeople should also guide their customers to the best measurement techniques. When they take the lead in preparing the periodic measurement reports, salespeople reinforce their roles as true partners in their customers’ desired outcomes.
The converse of this situation happens all too frequently: during the implementation, a customer stakeholder challenges the value being created, and without clear measures of progress, doubt begins to infuse the customer organization.
Conclusion—Getting to Desired Results Faster, for Everyone
When a salesperson uses navigation skills, everyone benefits: The customer gets to the desired destination (or results) faster. The selling company gets paid not only for its products or services, but both for the added value its salesperson provides by guiding the customer through the implementation process and for demonstrable, clearly measured results. And the salesperson benefits by deepening the relationship with the customer and becoming an essential partner on the customer’s journey.
Navigation skills are what will help you be a successful accelerator. The accelerator salesperson is all about getting the customers to the desired results faster. Navigation skills help you do that by assisting the client with identifying the destination, clarifying the path, and measuring progress.