CHAPTER 12

Great Selling: Core Selling Behaviors

Here’s an insight: accelerator selling is not all about insights. There is a role for insights in accelerator selling. The customer wants salespeople to offer a compelling vision of the future and a point of view on how the customer’s company needs to prepare for that future. And the customer wants that vision anchored in a deep understanding of the trends that are shaping the market, the major industry challenges, the performance of the top competitors, the position each player takes for itself, and the ways new entrants are reshaping the competitive game. The salespeople must be able to explain how their offering best prepares the customer for that future.

Customers in our research base say they want salespeople to offer these insights not with arrogance but with humility. Instead of approaches where the salesperson challenges or provokes the customer, what customers want is a salesperson who asks smart questions first. Yes, the salesperson should have done the necessary homework and obtained all publicly available information elsewhere. But executive buyers in particular want to be engaged in a conversation about what the future could bring. They do not want a salesperson telling them they must do a certain thing if they want to succeed going forward.

There are other issues with selling approaches that overrely on insights. First, insight-driven selling drives longer sales cycles, slower funnel velocity, and lower hit rates. These insight-driven sales often have no budgets allocated to them, require extensive stakeholder deliberation, and result in “no-decision” outcomes.

Second, insight selling is difficult to execute. Only a small percentage of salespeople have the capacity to create insights, even after training. As a result, many companies have their marketing departments create the insights, and they train their salespeople to customize those insights for each customer. Marketing-driven insights, however, have to be generated constantly to be current, and marketing’s natural distance from the customer can make those insights less relevant. Getting this right is possible, but it is a large and expensive undertaking.

The way to use insights well is to keep everything simple. Stay focused on the salesperson and the customer. Insights have to show that:

  The salesperson understands what’s important to each buyer at each customer organization and what results each buyer wants to achieve.

  The salesperson can help the customer get to those desired results faster.

BTS has identified the core behaviors of accelerator selling, of which insights is one component. In the next section, we’ll explore those behaviors.

How to Be an Accelerator Salesperson

There is a fairly specific set of knowledge and behaviors required to be a successful accelerator. Required knowledge starts with business acumen. That can come from industry experience (particularly in the customer’s industry), from training, from learning on the job, or from educational background. Without business acumen, the salesperson cannot fully appreciate the customer’s business context and the results the customer is executing toward.

Knowledge

Business acumen is the foundation that drives several types of knowledge that customers in our research tell us are critical today:

  Knowledge of the customer’s business

  Knowledge of the customer’s industry

  Knowledge of the salesperson’s own company

To be an accelerator, the salesperson must also have the product and technical knowledge required to define the customer journey—what the customer will do or deploy to accomplish its objectives.

Behaviors

We have identified the seven critical elements of accelerator selling. They are shown in the “periodic table” in Figure 12.1. The first elements describe what salespeople need to do.

Figure 12.1 Periodic table of accelerator-selling behaviors.

While there are other important categories of knowledge that must be demonstrated for customers, the one type of knowledge that is required for accelerator selling (and less important in product or solution selling) is:

  Customer understanding. Demonstrating deep knowledge of the customer’s business and industry.

The next row of the table shows the four steps that should be included in every customer interaction:

  Plan. Preparing for the customer interaction (not filling out a fancy, complicated worksheet, but spending sufficient time to do the necessary research, set objectives for the meeting, and create an agenda).

  Discover. Asking questions that get deep inside the customer’s view of the business.

  Engage. Rather than presenting, involving the customer in a compelling discussion of the value the salesperson’s company offers, ideally one where the offering is co-created with the customer.

  Advance. Moving the customer to the next stage in the buying process, no matter where that customer is in the buying cycle. Of course, this includes closing.

There are two final sales behaviors that are critical for accelerator sellers but take place out of the view of the customer:

  Manage. Creating strategies to manage opportunities, accounts, and territories.

  Collaborate. Working with others in the selling company on behalf of the customer.

A more detailed description of what “great” looks like for each behavior is provided in Table 12.1.

Table 12.1 Description of “Great” Accelerator-Selling Behaviors

The good news is that the seven behaviors above can all be learned. Now here’s the bad news: our research shows a significant gap on all seven behaviors between what customers want from their salespeople and what they receive. As described in Chapter 10, the data suggests that 77 percent of customers who prefer to be sold to in a way that accelerates their overall business results are instead being sold to in a way that is focused on products and problems.

Too much of today’s sales training is locked in a legacy worldview that no longer is relevant. While sales managers seek to inculcate new reps with the training concepts they once learned, many of those concepts have shrinking relevance today. Training people to “handle objections,” “identify champions,” and “find pain” (just a few examples) does not provide reps with the skills they need to be navigators and to demonstrate the behaviors that customers seek today.

What Is Different for Key Account Managers

Many salespeople are assigned to a single large account. They may be called “key account managers,” “strategic account managers,” “global account managers,” or something else. For simplicity here, we’re going to call them key account managers (KAMs).

It has now become commonplace to say that great salespeople don’t always make great sales managers. But guess what? Great salespeople don’t always make great KAMs either. KAMs require many of the same behaviors that are required of other salespeople in today’s sales environment, plus an additional set of behaviors that are critical in guiding teams to serve key accounts. There are 12 relevant behaviors. First we will list those; then we’ll assess where KAMs are typically weak and strong.

In Figure 12.2, the seven behaviors on the left are the critical behaviors for accelerator salespeople that we described above. The five behaviors on the right (in the black keys) are additional behaviors relevant to KAMs.

Figure 12.2 Definition of “great” for KAMs.

Our review of KAM programs at 15 major global sales forces suggests that KAMs fall short in particular behaviors. On average, most KAM organizations have the biggest gaps in the following subcomponents of each behavior category:

Customer Understanding

  Understanding the changing market dynamics affecting the customer’s business

Engage

  Engaging executives in customer organizations

  Assembling and presenting business cases to executives

Advance

  Using strategic customer understanding and business cases to move opportunities forward through the customer’s buying process

Company Understanding

  Creating business cases that demonstrate the value to the KAM’s own company of making changes to prices, resources, or customization on behalf of a specific customer

When you examine the gaps identified above, two themes emerge: dynamic business acumen and business-case agility (see Figure 12.3). Today these two abilities are what distinguish great KAMs from average KAMs. And look carefully: it’s all about change, about “dynamic” and “agility.” The rate of change in customer organizations is creating a need for KAMs to understand what is changing in a customer’s business (particularly those X-to-Y shifts) and to be able to present business cases on the spot in rapidly changing situations. Let’s explore those themes further.

Figure 12.3 Gaps in KAM behavior.

Dynamic Business Acumen

Traditionally, business acumen is defined as understanding how a company makes money. It includes knowledge of the drivers of growth, profitability, and cash flow; knowledge of the company’s markets; and knowledge of the interrelationships within the business. When we work with salespeople to build business acumen, we typically revise this definition to reflect the customer-facing nature of salespeople. In the sales world, business acumen means knowledge of the drivers of customer growth, profitability, and cash flow; knowledge of the customer’s markets; and knowledge of the interrelationships within the customer’s business.

Here’s what is critical for key account managers and what we mean by dynamic business acumen: knowledge of how the drivers of customer growth, profitability, and cash flow are changing; knowledge of how the customer’s markets are changing; and knowledge of how the interrelationships within the customer’s business are changing. Without becoming an expert on what is changing, salespeople cannot assist with the customer’s X → Y transition.

As we wrote in Chapter 9, frequent changes in customers’ strategic initiatives are impacting customer buying cycles in significant ways. Understanding those frequent changes is critical for a KAM who is accountable for dozens (or hundreds) of individual sales to one customer organization at any one time.

There is a huge upside to having true dynamic business acumen: access to more C-suite executives. While basic business acumen is a ticket to entry these days, it alone will not get the executive meeting. (It just ensures the meeting will go relatively well if the meeting is obtained.) Dynamic business acumen can actually drive greater C-level access because executives are always eager to talk with someone knowledgeable about what is changing in their company and their industry. This is particularly true if salespeople can convert their understanding into an insight that has value to the executive.

The easiest ways for a KAM to provide insights to executives are to (1) understand current marketplace trends and discuss the likelihood and severity of their potential impacts on this company and (2) provide realistic options, or execution paths, and describe the advantages and disadvantages of each. Promising one or both of those to an executive will almost always result in a meeting.

Building dynamic business acumen capabilities also enables the second success factor: business-case agility.

Business-Case Agility

There are two reasons that salespeople prepare business cases: First, they sometimes need to defend to the customer the value of what they are proposing. (In these cases, shorter justifications work best, with detailed appendixes if needed.) Second, salespeople sometimes need to present a business case internally on behalf of a customer when they are trying to do something that requires going beyond standard procedures. Often they are asking for additional resources for the customer, extensive customization of the solution, or further discounts.

Generally, salespeople are weak in preparing business cases. They typically don’t get training on how to prepare a business case; there are few if any good models to work from; and broadly speaking, people with strong analytic skills are often not attracted to sales roles. This skill gap is usually balanced with other strengths and talents, and it does not significantly impact the salesperson’s ability to sell. However, with those in KAM roles, the ability to prepare and present a business case becomes more important, both because of the level at which they are operating and because of the sheer number of sales they are responsible for.

Not only do KAMs need to be proficient with creating and presenting business cases; they need to do so with agility—adapting business cases to changing situations:

  Quick changes on the fly. KAMs must be able to adapt their business cases to the dynamic customer situations and markets we described earlier. There often isn’t time to go back to the office and work with a colleague or manager. It has to happen in the moment.

  Presentations without preparation. KAMs can be called upon at any time to present a business case. They can’t count on time to prepare and rehearse. In these sudden presentations, it’s critical that they not get flustered; they have to demonstrate confidence. Tentativeness will make customers hesitant.

Dynamic business acumen and business-case agility will improve the ability of KAMs to demonstrate customer understanding at a strategic level, enable better conversations with and presentations to executives, advance customer decision processes, and allow for better internal decisions in support of key accounts.

Next we’ll leave the world of key accounts and look at prospecting, for all types of salespeople.

Behaviors that Make Prospecting Successful

One of the most common questions we get from salespeople and sales leaders is, “What can we do differently to improve our prospecting efforts?” The answer lies not in increased call activity levels, not in search engine optimization, and certainly not in buying those e-mail lists you get offered in spam messages. Surprisingly, the answer comes down to age-old human wisdom: serve other people before expecting them to do something for you.

Much of what we describe below applies to growing existing accounts as well as to prospecting. To keep things simple, we’ll discuss prospecting first and come back to account expansion later.

Desperately Seeking Value

When a buyer is having her first interaction with a new salesperson, the primary question in her mind is whether the salesperson and his company can offer her more value than her existing approach. Typically, the salesperson does the following:

  Explains what his company does

  Describes how his company’s offering is different from that of the competition

  Tells stories about similar customers

  Asks for a follow-up discussion or a trial purchase

Better salespeople also demonstrate knowledge of the prospect’s business, ask questions about her priorities, engage her in cocreating a solution, and demonstrate documented business results from other work. The best salespeople do all of the above, plus they tailor every interaction to only focus on the things that are the most important to the customer. Two outcomes typically result from these conversations:

1.  She’s just not that into you. Sometimes the prospect essentially throws the salesperson out the door because she’s just not interested. Often she’s happy with her current provider. Sometimes the particular offering the salesperson is selling is not high enough on her priority list to spend time on. In that case, she may refer the salesperson to someone else on her team. Or she may just say some variation of “This is really interesting. Now is not the right time, but I appreciate your coming by today, and I’ll keep you in mind for when we’re ready to consider this.” It’s the equivalent of “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

2.  Risky business. Often, the best achievable outcome is the prospect offering to explore the possibility further. In these situations, the prospect is now considering taking on a considerable amount of risk in trying something new in exchange for a hope of better rewards in the future. Her willingness to take on the risk depends a lot on how successfully the salesperson painted a highly attractive but believable vision of the alternative future.

In the first scenario, the prospect dismissed the option of taking on the risk of a new solution, at least for the time being. In the second option, she began to take on some risk and to explore taking on more risk. The question for salespeople is, How can you encourage prospects to take the second option and to accelerate their exploration (or buying) process?

Risk Management

So we have a client who is, in her head, calculating risk and assessing whether to explore an approach that is different from what she has done in the past. As mentioned earlier, one strategy to increase her openness to this exploration is to increase the potential reward by depicting an attractive but realistic vision of what a better future could be. We will explore techniques to do this further in Chapter 14.

The other strategy for salespeople is to minimize the risk. There are two traditional ways to do this, and we’re going to offer a powerful third way.

  Reduce the real risk. Offer trials. Invite the customer to a “customer experience center” to see the solution in action. Offer a significant discount on the first purchase. Structure the pricing so that the customer only pays for what is used without a large up-front commitment. Provide service-level guarantees.

  Reduce the perception of risk. Provide references of other happy customers. Help the prospect understand that the likelihood of problems is minimal. Tell stories of successful implementations. Address explicit and implicit concerns. Chapter 13 will offer 10 compelling ways to reduce the perception of risk.

Now here’s the third way:

  Serve before you sell. Give the prospect something of value before she buys anything. By providing value, you will shift the way she perceives you and encourage reciprocal behavior.

What It Looks Like to Serve

Let’s look more closely at what it means to serve before you sell. First, let’s be clear on what serving is not. Serving is not about bringing doughnuts, key chains, thumb drives, or pens to your customer. It’s not about sponsoring a pizza lunch for the customer’s office. It’s not about offering gifts or presents. Gift giving is a perfectly legitimate thing, particularly when used to genuinely express thanks or to show people that you care about them. But serving is different from gift giving.

Serving is about fulfilling a specific need or priority you’ve identified in your conversations with a customer or prospect. When you serve someone, it always involves doing something specific and customized for that individual. That is, it’s not something you do for a group of similar people. It’s not about adding people to mass e-mail lists or newsletters in hope that they might find something useful there. It has to be for an individual, and it has to be in direct response to a need or priority that individual has.

Identifying the need or priority is part of the magic. In a prospecting conversation with a prospect, you might hear any number of things with which you can help, even without the prospect buying anything. Here are examples of customer cues that trigger ways to serve the customer:

  The customer confesses a major challenge that she doesn’t know how to address. You might serve her by providing an article or blog post of which she was unaware that addresses exactly that issue.

  You discover that the customer is struggling with a particular element of his operations, where your company has great expertise. You offer to connect him with your own internal experts.

  Your customer has a large multisite organization where communication with headquarters is weak. Use your local account managers to help drive communication in both directions.

  Your customer is preparing for a critical meeting with her executives, and you offer to help prepare a slide for a presentation.

  The customer might disclose that he is looking to hire someone with a specific background, and you provide the name of a LinkedIn group that would be a great place to post a job listing.

  The customer may mention that she is spending her vacation fly-fishing in Montana, and you know an expert on fly-fishing in Montana. Or a great place to eat … or to fish.

You can serve your customers’ personal or professional needs or priorities. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that it’s about the customers and what they are looking for, not about you (see Figure 12.4).

Figure 12.4 How to serve a prospect.

Social science research has shown that gifts are most likely to result in reciprocal behavior when the favors are unexpected and personalized. That’s why figuring out what your customers’ needs and priorities are is the first step. And the second step is giving them something they wouldn’t have expected from a salesperson or don’t get from other salespeople who call on them.

Why Serving Works

Why does it work to serve your customers first before selling? And does it really lead to a sale?

There are two powerful reasons why serving can be so useful in selling.

Sparking the Value Exchange

First, one of the hardest parts of prospecting is getting new customers to engage in a value exchange with you. They might meet with you and even listen to you, but will they take the next step into a business transaction? When you offer value first, instead of requiring them to agree to a purchase first, you make it easier to establish that business relationship.

In a normal selling situation, the business relationship truly begins when the customer either signs a contract or agrees to an initial purchase. In those situations, the customer is the first one to put real value on the table. By serving the customer first, the salesperson is putting value on the table. That makes it easier for the customer to move to the next step.

Wait, though. You might say that throughout a sales process, the salesperson is offering all sorts of value: information about solutions, options and alternatives, reference cases, etc. But rarely are these differentiated. Every supplier offers some version of the same thing. The key in serving the customer first is to do it in a differentiated way. This typically comes down to the salesperson more than the selling company. Great salespeople are always finding ways to serve the particular needs of their individual prospects and customers. It’s part of what makes customers loyal to them. They do it in a way that is unique to them, because of their personal interests, connections, passion, and resources.

Triggering Reciprocity

Second, people are naturally wired to be reciprocal. All human societies require reciprocal behavior. We are brought up to repay people for their kindness. This social web of indebtedness, where people share food and skills, is deeply rooted in evolution. In fact, we consider it antisocial to violate reciprocity rules, and we apply derisive labels to people who do, such as “freeloader,” “moocher,” “parasite,” “ingrate,” etc. People go to great lengths to avoid being considered ungrateful. Not responding to a favor produces both internal discomfort and external shame.

In Go Wild, Harvard Medical School professor John Ratey, MD, and journalist Richard Manning explore the evolutionary basis of many of our behaviors, including this reciprocity obligation. They describe the biochemistry of community and the role that the hormone oxytocin plays in our desire to be altruistic, which enables our society to function. For a moment their research turns to the business world:

Research has also shown that oxytocin plays a key role in business transactions, especially in establishing trust. This is not as squishy as it might sound. Economists will tell you that the workings of the marketplace depend on a foundation of trust, that the glue of our economic lives rests on our ability to trust one another well enough to do deals.

The authors go on to say:

People engaged in business transactions produce a spurt of oxytocin. If one person gives another person ten dollars, the recipient’s oxytocin levels spike a bit. But here’s the kicker: if a computer gives that same person ten dollars, his levels of oxytocin do not increase.

A corollary of the reciprocity obligation happens all the time during negotiations. There is a social obligation to make concessions to those who have made concessions to us. Used thoughtfully and strategically, this approach to concessions can kick-start a stalled negotiation.

Remember, though, that for reciprocity obligations to be triggered, the act of serving has to be noble and unconditional. You do not serve customers because you are expecting them to buy something from you as a direct result. You serve them because you can and because it is the right thing to do. If you become manipulative with how you serve people, people will see through it, and it will not work.

Account Expansion

For simplicity, the examples above focus on prospecting. But do the same tactics work with existing customers? Yes. Finding people’s interests and needs and serving them by providing something unexpected and personalized always works. But you have to do it early in your relationship. Once the buyer questions your value, it can be too late to change that person’s mind.

With more and more of today’s buying processes turning into multiplayer games, we see salespeople forgetting to manage all the stakeholders. One way to address the multiple players now engaged in each buying decision is to identify their interests and needs and provide them with something unexpected and personalized.

Listeners Wanted

We live in a world today where almost every moment is filled with e-mails, tweets, news feed updates, mobile phone alerts, and text messages. We’re bombarded with updates, but most have limited value to us. We’re surprised and gratified, then, when something personalized and useful comes our way.

Perhaps the most important element of serving customers is that it shows you have listened. You have listened to what is uniquely relevant to them. That act overcomes a tremendous hurdle with prospects and customers who report that salespeople typically do not listen. By establishing that you are a listener, you change the game and become a welcome partner to that prospect or customer.

Conclusion—Driving the Customer Along the X → XY → Y Path

This chapter has articulated the specific behaviors that enable salespeople to sell in a way that accelerates their customers’ desired business results. Each of these behaviors contributes to your ability to help your customers get to their intended destination. Let’s take a quick look at how each of the behaviors mentioned enables the salesperson to help customers get to their desired Y faster.

In moving customers on the X → XY → Y path, deep knowledge of each customer’s business and industry allows a richer conversation and therefore one that can be had with executive decision makers. Because the X → XY → Y journey is new, planning before each customer interaction is vital. These are complicated conversations. Using discovery skills to ask intelligent and provocative questions creates an interactive atmosphere in which alternative scenarios can be explored.

By engaging customers in cocreating the offering you will sell to them, you become their partner, and you shape a proposal that acknowledges their position on their X → XY → Y journey. It will be hard for a competitor to do that. By understanding their decision-making process in the context of their journey (and the decision vortices that will inevitably slow decisions down), you can help them make smarter choices faster, advancing their purchasing decisions. When you take a view of your portfolio of customers that strategically identifies where they are on their X-to-Y journey, you can better prioritize your limited time. Working with others in your organization, you can collaborate in ways that bring unexpected expertise to your customers as they move through their change process.

If you are the key account manager, it becomes critical not only to understand your customers’ business but also to know how their business drivers are changing. When you work with just one customer organization, you have to have an even deeper level of insight into that customer’s world. Additionally, you must be able to create business cases quickly, both so that you can prepare them on the spot in front of customers and so that you can present them internally in your own company on your customers’ behalf. With change occurring rapidly, you must be able to defend the value of your offerings on the spot in the face of new customer priorities and access additional company resources quickly.

If you are prospecting, you want to serve before you sell. You can spark a value exchange and trigger reciprocity by providing your prospect or customer with articles, connections, advice, and assistance in defining Y or XY or making the X → XY → Y journey. Simply by describing how an X → XY → Y approach can make a change initiative more successful will in itself be of tremendous service.