3 What the New Buyers Expect: Situational Fluency

Psychologists define a persona as a social role or a character played by an actor. The word is derived from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatrical mask.¹ In The Collaborative Sale we are introducing you to three new sales personae, which are character parts that sellers must play within the buyer's process in order to be successful with Buyer 2.0.

So what does this mean, exactly? It means that no matter what job title, function, or role a seller may take on, the seller must assume the mask or the persona that selling to Buyer 2.0 requires.

We want to be perfectly clear about what we are saying. To help us do this, let's first take a look at how sellers are often categorized. For example, sellers can be classified by different types, profiles, roles, or titles. Figure 3.1 displays only a few of the dozens of different classifications of sellers that we've seen our clients use.

Another example of seller classification is used by the Chally Group, which provides a hierarchical model of sales roles organized into 12 different selling job functions, classified by hunter/farmer, inside/outside, direct/indirect, specialized product/full line, and major account/territory. (See Figure 3.2.)²

A persona is not a sales title, type, profile, or job role. A persona is a character role that sellers need to assume and play no matter how they are categorized or profiled, in order to be successful with Buyer 2.0. For example, some sellers prefer to pursue new business in new accounts—they are often called hunters. Other sellers prefer to cultivate relationships and grow recurring business with existing accounts—they are typically called farmers. Both are legitimate and valuable sales types. Both are useful, but with a different focus. Both can achieve high levels of success with Buyer 2.0 if they assume the correct persona at the right time, in order to align with the buyer's process and state of mind. No matter the sellers’ type, role, or function, they must assume the right character parts as they interact with Buyer 2.0. All three personae in The Collaborative Sale—the Micro-Marketer, the Visualizer, and the Value Driver—are usually played in every sales opportunity involving Buyer 2.0.

Seller Agility

A collaborative seller must know when to play the right persona, in order to keep in harmony with Buyer 2.0. There is not a single best or only sales persona that always produces the highest results. Instead, the most effective selling persona is the one that matches each specific customer situation and aligns with Buyer 2.0's current state. An effective seller knows how to play all three sales personae and can migrate easily between them, from one to another as needed. This is called seller agility.

Analyzing what individual sellers need in order to play each persona successfully reveals the essential competencies required for each. This can be very useful for evaluating the suitability of candidates for certain selling jobs, or for determining what knowledge, skills, and abilities need to be developed for executing the sales personae and for higher levels of performance. Sellers who lack the right competencies or the necessary sales agility to execute all types of sales personae are more likely to fail because they cannot adjust and align with Buyer 2.0.

The three sales personae of The Collaborative Sale align with Buyer 2.0's concerns as they progress through the buying process. In actual practice, the application of the three sales personae overlaps. (See Figure 3.3.) Each can be utilized at any point of the buying process, as required.

• The Micro-Marketer persona is typically played by sellers when engaging with Buyer 2.0 early in the buying process. This persona seeks to provide useful advice and innovative ideas to potential buyers who are in the latent stage of their buying process when the goal is to stimulate their interest or to help shape their view of possible solutions. However, the Micro-Marketer persona really never ends. Sellers continuously need to create and stimulate demand as well as grow their pipelines with new opportunities, without exception.
• The Visualizer persona is typically played in the middle of Buyer 2.0's buying process. The Visualizer seeks to create, expand, or reengineer visions of solutions that are compelling, so the buyer wants to take action. Being able to collaborate with buyers, understand their situations, and provide valuable insight and visions on how to address their issues are key Visualizer competencies.
• The Value Driver persona is played by sellers throughout Buyer 2.0's entire buying process. The Value Driver never stops thinking about value. This persona literally leads with, sells with, and closes with the value of the solution. Value Drivers give buyers a compelling reason to act and avoid the negative impact of delay, and they use value to mitigate buyer perceptions of risk.

The foundational competency required for mastery of all three of the personae in The Collaborative Sale is called situational fluency.

Situational Fluency

Conversations between buyers and sellers have to change. As we learned in the previous chapter, the profound changes in buyer behavior dictate this. The sales conversation can no longer focus on the seller's products and services; it must be about the buyer's business results. Buyer 2.0 specifically wants to talk and do business with sellers who understand buyers’ business, situations, challenges, and opportunities. They have very little time for a generalist. They prefer to deal with a specialist in their given field or industry.

Buyer 2.0 does not have time for overly aggressive or excessively friendly sellers who are only interested in selling them something. After all, Buyer 2.0's process isn't about the seller at all. Buyer 2.0 wants sellers to collaborate with them, to act more like consultants, and to provide useful expertise.

This requires sellers to possess a foundational selling competency called situational fluency. It is a unique combination of knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitude that makes sellers effective with today's buyers. It is the key competency required to execute successfully all three personae of the Collaborative Sale.

Ironically, we have found that many sales managers tend to look for certain qualities when hiring sellers, but those qualities are often different from what most buyers want and look for in sellers. Sales managers tend to seek sellers with successful track records and great selling skills—someone who can close business. Buyers, in contrast, want to engage with someone who really knows their business and who is interested in helping them solve problems and achieve results. However, this doesn't mean these two very different desires have to be mutually exclusive. With good situational fluency, sellers can do both—they can help buyers solve problems while at the same time helping their own organization reach sales and revenue targets.

So, why don't companies simply change their hiring and development practices to align with what buyers want in sellers? It is really very simple: they are too short-term focused. Organizations depend upon monthly and quarterly results, and they think assertive or aggressive sellers who push for the business are the answer. In truth, this is really very old-fashioned thinking.

Granted, previous sales success and some assertiveness are useful characteristics in selling, but they don't ensure future success. This is particularly true when selling into new industries, or selling new products and services, or selling under a new business model. For example, take our story about Jon in our opening chapter. His past success was due in large part to selling in periods of high demand when winning business was much easier than it is today. High-demand markets are like rising tides—they help to float all boats.

Components of Situational Fluency

As illustrated in Figure 3.4, the three components of situational fluency are:

1. Knowledge—situational knowledge and capability knowledge
2. Skills—people skills and selling skills
3. Attitude—willingness to collaborate

Situational Knowledge

Knowledge is both the awareness of something, as well as any information, understanding, or skill one learns from experience or education. Situational knowledge is the awareness of a buyer's circumstances, as well as the understanding of the implications of that situation based on the seller's experience or learning. A thorough knowledge and understanding of the buyer's industry, trends, key players, problems, challenges, opportunities, and desired results is therefore a requirement for sellers today. Remember, Buyer 2.0 wants to do business with sellers who can collaborate with buyers to help them see ways of solving problems, including those they may have not yet seen or considered. How can a seller do this without first understanding the buyer's situation and what it means?

Buyer 2.0 doesn't have time to spend on sellers who only pitch products or services, especially when what they pitch isn't a capability that is relevant or it doesn't solve a problem. Sellers who don't understand the buyer's business are reduced in status to mere vendors, not the valued and trusted advisers they aspire and need to be.

Capability Knowledge

Sellers must know more than just the essential capabilities of their products or services; they must also know how those capabilities can be converted into a desired result. Sellers’ capability knowledge enables them to collaborate and create visions of possible solutions for buyers.

When Buyer 2.0 engages sellers, the sellers are expected to add value immediately. Therefore, sellers must not only understand their own products or services and the capabilities they can provide, but they must also have very good knowledge of available alternatives in the marketplace that could address the buyer's challenges or opportunities.

One caution: too often, product and services training focuses on features and functions, bells and whistles, or “speeds and feeds,” and not enough on applications and results. Collaborative sellers need to know what their capabilities do for customers, and not just what the capabilities are.

People Skills

Though they are universally acknowledged as vital to the success of sellers, interpersonal or people skills have many different definitions and descriptions.

In 1936, Dale Carnegie popularized the value of people skills in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People.³ In the original 1936 edition, he described the power of interpersonal skills for sellers, saying that they “Enable you to win new clients, [and] new customers.… Increase your earning power.…Make you a better salesman.”⁴

According to Harriet Rifkin of the Business Journal News Service, “people skills” are described as:

• Understanding ourselves and moderating our responses
• Talking effectively and empathizing accurately
• Building relationships of trust, respect, and productive interactions⁵

The Macmillan Dictionary provides a more succinct definition of people skills: “The ability to communicate effectively with people in a friendly way, especially in business.”⁶

Our clients have shared various ways of describing people skills with us. Some of the typical characteristics of individuals with good people skills are:

• They understand themselves and how their behavior impacts others.
• They control their responses; they try to be less impulsive and to think before acting.
• They have a sincere desire to assist others in the pursuit of goals; they are able to tune in accurately to the feelings and needs of others and then treat people accordingly.
• They work at managing relationships, building networks, and finding common ground in order to minimize conflict and maximize rapport.
• They are consistently approachable.
• They create an environment of trust.

People buy from people, and they are much more likely to buy from people whom they like. More importantly in this risk-averse world, people are very hesitant to collaborate with people they dislike. Therefore, the collaborative seller must possess good people skills, no matter whether engaging with buyers face-to-face or by any other means. But collaborative sellers must be more than just likable experts. They must get customers excited about a new solution, appealing to Buyer 2.0's emotions as well as intellect.

Selling Skills

At their most basic level, the skills required to sell are learned abilities that allow people to carry out specific tasks that lead to predetermined results within a specified period of time. Quite simply, selling skills are taught and learned—they are not something you are born with. This is contrary to many people's beliefs who say, “He or she is a natural-born seller.” Sellers are not born; they are developed.

This does not mean that certain human characteristics associated with sellers, such as being friendly, persuasive, talkative, outgoing, and likable, are not characteristics that many good sellers have. In fact, they often do have these qualities. The key point is these characteristics alone do not make a good seller.

Selling skills are those that allow the successful execution of specific selling activities, including but not limited to stimulating interest, qualifying opportunities, determining needs, diagnosing problems, presenting, negotiating, and closing, to cite some common examples. The skills required for these selling activities—often called sales competencies—can be developed to higher levels of mastery and proficiency with training, practice, and coaching. Sellers who commit themselves to continuous learning and improvement of these skills are better equipped to engage effectively with Buyer 2.0.

Collaborative Attitude

Collaborating with Buyer 2.0 requires more than just skills and knowledge; it also requires the right attitude. Sellers must be willing to work with buyers in a spirit of openness and transparency. Collaborative sellers share and explain the reasons for their methods and approaches openly with buyers, and they consistently demonstrate that they are acting with the buyer's interests in mind first.

This attitude represents a much different outlook for most sellers. A product-focused seller considers success to be a sale, even if that means a less than optimal outcome for the buyer. A collaborative seller starts with a mind-set that the buyer's interests are of paramount importance, even if that means qualifying out of a sale. The key is to always act in the best interests of the buyer, even if that means a smaller sale or no sale at all. Buyer 2.0 values sellers who do the right thing, especially if the buyer knows the actions a seller takes are not in the seller's sole interest, but in the buyer's own best interests. In the long run, these are the sellers that earn lasting trust, loyalty, and repeat business from buyers.

The five components of situational fluency—situational knowledge, capability knowledge, people skills, selling skills, and collaborative attitude—are all required when selling to Buyer 2.0.

Hiring for Situational Fluency

As we mentioned earlier, sales managers tend to hire sellers who exhibit good people and selling skills, before any other considerations. They generally seek people who show they are strong closers of business, with good track records of achieving or exceeding their assigned sales goals.

Although past success can be a useful indicator of future performance, it is no guarantee, especially when selling to Buyer 2.0, who wants consultative sellers who add value to the buying process, insightfully diagnose buyers’ situations, and prescribe the specific capabilities that will help them reach or exceed their goals. Sales managers should therefore look for people who exhibit all five aspects of situational fluency, or who demonstrate a willingness to develop the required components of situational fluency quickly. If a sales manager ignores any of the five components of situational fluency in evaluating candidates for sales positions, it will likely result in hiring people who cannot collaborate with and sell to Buyer 2.0.

We suggest that companies conduct and or use assessment vehicles to assist them during the hiring process to determine the candidate's situational fluency. We describe these kinds of assessments in more detail in Chapter 9.

Developing Situational Fluency

An important question for sales executives is: can situational fluency be developed quickly, or is it learned only through time and direct experience? In working with clients, we have discovered that it can be developed to high levels of proficiency quickly with a combination of training, reinforcement, and coaching.

If your company provides only product training for sellers, don't be surprised when sellers fail. When the emphasis of training is on details of products and services to be sold instead of about the problems and opportunities they address within a customer's business or situation, it is almost impossible for sellers to develop sufficient situational fluency. There must be a balance of training and development for situational knowledge and capability knowledge, with practice and coaching for selling skills and people skills. We have also found that when sellers are suitably equipped with the right knowledge and skills, they tend to develop the right collaborative attitude as well, especially when it is reinforced with consistent messaging from their managers.

Technology's Role in Situational Fluency

For many sellers, situational knowledge is more difficult to develop than capability knowledge. Fortunately, technology now provides opportunities for sellers to develop situational knowledge more quickly. Tracking relevant industry trends and events is much easier today using tools like Google Alerts, InsideView, web content aggregation sites, Twitter Search, LinkedIn discussion groups, OneSource iSell trigger event monitoring, and many other applications.

These sales enablement tools can help sellers to follow key accounts’ website changes, tweets from buyers, and related blogs. They can help to identify key players and individuals to target, connect with, and join in online discussions. They can make it easier to follow industry analysts and monitor relevant business trends of interest to buyers. By tracking job postings, keeping up with financial trends, and setting up automated keyword tracking agents on targeted companies, sellers can identify business issues worthy of further investigation and possible development into a sales opportunity. Finally, automated tools can help sellers to monitor the activities of direct competitors and to learn more about their capabilities.

Automated monitoring of customers’ businesses and relevant industry trends takes some time to set up, but once in place, it can provide a well-tuned stream of relevant information that will help sellers to develop proficiency in understanding their customer situations and how to address them. This can help sellers to develop higher levels of situational fluency faster.