CHAPTER 16
,The Containment Strategy
Transition Back to Indirect
Though the enemy be stronger in numbers, we may prevent him from fighting.
—Sun Tzu
If you are not able to win the business with a Direct, Indirect, or Divisional approach, you should consider the Containment strategy. Its purpose is to delay the customer’s decision, therefore buying you enough time to gather strength and win the business with an Indirect approach. The two strategies work seamlessly in tandem with each other.
Even a short delay before a sales situation peaks can cause a disproportionate impact on all the competitors. For example, your competitor will presumably be working hard to synchronize her sales strategy to that point when the customer is ready, willing, and able to make a purchase decision. At that point, every day that goes by without closing the deal represents a geometric increase in her vulnerability. Other competitors may improve their solution during this time, possibly providing a lower price and preferred business terms. Changes in the customer environment, such as a shift in the Situational Power Base, a reallocation of budget, or a restructuring of the organization, may occur, thus destabilizing everyone’s sales campaign.
The challenge, however, is not delaying the customer evaluation for several days or a week, because this will likely assist the customer by referencing some future event or new information that will help him with his evaluation. The real challenge is figuring out what to do with the time you now have. But before we dive into that, let’s be clear as to how you can actually delay a decision.
As you know from Chapter 13, three customer states must be present for a sales situation to peak and for a close condition to exist. The customer must be ready, willing, and able to make a decision, having effectively evaluated all the potential suppliers.
When you implement a Containment strategy, you are eliminating the customer’s ready state to make a decision.
Knowing that you lack the relative superiority to win a sales situation that is about to peak, you introduce new insight that the customer will want to include as part of the evaluation process, thus slowing it down until the insight can be gained. For example, imagine that you’ve arranged a meeting between the customer and a recognized industry leader, perhaps someone like your Chief Executive Officer (CEO) or Vice President (VP) of Research and Development. You might explain to the customer that your CEO would like to meet with him to put forth a corporate commitment to the success of your solution. If the competition then tries to close the deal before this has occurred, the customer might say, “We do plan to make a decision shortly, as we are just completing our evaluation.” If the customer individual is a Competitor Supporter or Ally, he or she may go further and explain the reason for the delay; however, it is unlikely to alter the situation. Again, this will be only a few days, not weeks; you cannot eliminate the ready state for very long. This brings us back to the point of what to do with the time you now have.
It makes sense to implement a Containment strategy when you are in second place and have miscalculated somewhere during the sales campaign. Perhaps the person you thought to be the Fox turned out, on further investigation, to not even be a member of the Situational Power Base. Mistakes like this happen, because sales is a management science and not an exact science. You might have misread certain customer requirements or you might not have made your way high up enough on the Sales Value Chain. Whatever the reason, there needs to be a specific issue—of which you are aware—that has put you in second place and is the problem you are buying time to address.
Your sales manager might want to know why you weren’t aware of it sooner; however, a peaking sales situation gives you visibility into what is going on far more clearly than earlier in the sales cycle. Having said that, it’s not enough to just fix the problem. You need to gather some new piece of information, one that would have likely influenced the customer’s support for you if he or she had known about it earlier. We refer to this as a face-saver.
If a customer individual has voiced support for your competition, that person needs a legitimate reason for shifting positions. Without such a reason, it will look like he or she is flip-flopping indecisively, damaging his or her credibility. So if you caused a delay in the customer decision by setting up a meeting with your CEO, for example, your executive must do two things: fix the compete problem and provide a face-saver for those who have supported your competition.
The best way to accomplish this is to change the ground rules with an Indirect sales strategy. If the CEO can move your solution higher up on the Sales Value Chain in a manner that advances the Situational Fox’s Personal Motivator, you will likely pull the rug out from under the competition, while enabling customer individuals to save face and support you. This is a lot to accomplish, so it’s best to think of it as Milestone Stacking with the CEO doing the heavy lifting.
There are specific times and circumstances when it makes sense to use a Containment approach, and there are times when it does not. Delaying a customer decision and hoping that circumstances will change is not a great use of time. And you never want to involve your senior management unless you understand exactly what you are doing. Otherwise, you risk creating some negative high-level exposure for yourself.
The key is to use a Containment approach only when you really need it—and one way you’ll know is if you’ve exhausted every possibility to effectively employ one of the other three classes of strategy. We recommend something that we call a Red Cell exercise to accomplish this.