A few weeks ago the folks at Kadient briefed me on their approach and their sales performance improvement tools.  As you would expect, I posed the chicken-and-egg question with respect to what order a company should implement Kadient’s tools versus installing and implementing a sales methodology.  I liked their answers.

I picked up a tweet from Kadient’s Rich Berkman (@richberk) last week about a new guide they had just published, How to Create Killer Sales Playbooks: Four Steps for Designing Sales Playbooks that Win Deals.

Just from the title, I was immediately encouraged.  Here’s why:

1. I believe in sales playbooks. I’ve used them and have recommended them to clients, who generally saw significant performance improvement;
2. “Four Steps” represents process and sales leaders and sales people can often use a lot more of that;
3. The guide is focused on winning deals.

I downloaded the guide and read through it.   These guys from Kadient get it.  Here’s a quote from the guide (with permission).  Highlights are mine:

Whether you decide to begin with a top-down or bottom-up approach, your playbooks should be aligned with your sales process.

“But, wait,” you say. “We don’t have a sales process!” This is a very common situation. Chances are that you do have some process or steps that define the stages of your sales cycle. Sales playbooks are an excellent organizational hub for defining them. Also, every organization has successful salespeople who are following their own processes.

If you don’t have a defined process, you can still get started quickly by defining a baseline set of sales stages and then using playbooks as your organizing tool for its development. Focus on mapping out your existing sales-to-buyer lifecycle or process. Some of the most successful playbooks have been those designed from a blank slate or ones in which it was decided that the sales process would be reinvented through the use of sales playbooks.

If you have a sales process (or multiple ones), align it with your customers’ buying cycle and create a map for your sales playbook. The goal is to stimulate a conversation between seller and buyer-the seller diagnosing the buyer’s needs and then providing the buyer with the right information at the right time.

In addition to directing salespeople to what they should do at each stage of the sales cycle, mapping will also identify specific activities that need to be completed to advance deals. This should illustrate how your sales teams engage with customers at every stage of the buying process.

You can download the guide here (registration required).  I highly recommend it.

Photo credit: © Sharpshot – Fotolia.com

ESR has a unique perspective on sales performance improvement. We don’t deliver sales training or sales consulting. We’re sales training industry observers, analysts, researchers and advisors to our clients on what works in sales effectiveness and training.

Here’s what’s been going on at ESR:

• A large client in the financial services sector is working very hard to keep their sales opportunities from coming down to price.  That tendency is considerably worse right now than it’s been in previous years.  They have superior service, a stellar reputation, a world-class team, enviable financial viability, and other significant customer-focused advantages. But in many situations, it’s a challenge to get the customer to acknowledge the direct link from all those capabilities to measurable business value for them.  The client is becoming considerably better a competing, employing advanced selling skills, strategies and tactics for overcoming price disadvantage, when it exists.  Even though demand is up, commoditization is the biggest challenge.  All in all, a challenging year.  I believe they’ll get through this pretty well, with everything considered.
• A smaller client is facing other challenges.  They are doing well at demand creation.  A strong marketing function is serving the sales team well.  However, they’re facing the all-too-common 80/20 situation.  The 20% of the reps that are bringing in the deals are top quality.  The company has to make a move to redeploy the reps who can’t be trained and coached into a higher level of sales productivity.  Also, the company is relatively process deficient.  They possess a single, high-level Powerpoint slide that represents their selling process, but it is in no way sufficient to drive consistent performance across an entire sales team.  The good news is that a strong management team is determined to overcome the challenges they have.  We’re working with the CEO who will be driving the transition to a more effective sales capability.  They aren’t looking for shortcuts.
• One Fortune 500 company is coaching us through creation of a collaborative proposal for ESR to perform an assessment of their global sales approach and capabilities.  That will result in an RFP and a vendor evaluation and selection process.  They need to transition from the commodity approach they employ now to a more collaborative and consultative relationships with customers.  They are seeking a long-term sales training/consulting partner.  We are delighted that they are taking a strategic approach to sales effectiveness. They aren’t looking for shortcuts either.
• Another Fortune 25 is in an enviable position with regard to the stimulus package and Obama’s strong energy initiatives.  They want to make the most out of this situation.  We’re providing guidance to them on the right approach for re-engineering their sales processes as well as in selecting a training partner.  They’ll only have one chance to get this right, and they know it.  No shortcuts here either.
• ESR is working with a leading sales training company, surveying the effectiveness of social media in B2B selling.  I’ll provide a link to the short survey soon.
• ESR has been investigating and evaluating the use of virtual worlds—mainly Second Life—for training and strategic account management among some very large corporations.  Anders Gronstedt is the expert in this area when applied to sales effectiveness and training.  We’ll be reporting on Second Life in March.
• Having suffered through a number of delays, ESR’s Sales Training Vendor Guide, Third Edition will be published.  Right now, I’m the bottleneck.
• Within a week ESR will be publishing a research update on Sales 2.0.  I’ve been writing about this subject a lot on this blog.  I’m very concerned about all the hype around Sales 2.0 and that it is distracting many companies from doing the right things to improve sales effectiveness.  Al Case, our Principal Analyst, performed the research and is authoring the reports.  I’m certain they’ll be enlightening because we’re unbiased, objective and don’t have any Sales 2.0 products or services to sell you.
• We’re working with a few trainers looking to sell or license their IP.  At the same time we are in discussions with several entrepreneurs looking to invest, in one form or another, in sales training IP.  Lots of phone calls and a bit of match making.
• We’ve got a number of events coming up:
  • FranklinCovey Sales Performance Group — Wed, March 11, 1:00 pm ET — Strategies For Getting Your Customers Through the Financial Crisis A webinar.
  • The TAS Group — April 8th — Time and subject to be announced for this webinar.
  • Callidus Software — June 26 — Sales 2.0: How to Realize the Full Potential Value – A webinar.
  • Boston Conferencing — July 30 — Hiring Salesreps and Managers That Get The Job Done A paid webinar.
  • We’re presenting at ASTD’s ICE conference May 31 to June 3: How to Measure Sales Performance Improvement
  • I’ll be keynoting at SMT’s annual conference October 14-16
  • Assorted presentations at different internal company events…
• Lots more going on, including a new ESR website, new value for our subscribers, and a few new, exciting initiatives.

We at ESR are fortunate, at least for the moment.  We see opportunity.  Our clients need our guidance.  So long was we can directly contribute to them getting through these tough economic times, they’ll be OK and therefore we will as well.

Photo credit: © Stephen Coburn – Fotolia.com

Hey, I have a proposition for you.

I had a really bad experience with Dearborn Trade Press (now Kaplan Financial Publishing) with my book, How Winners Sell, Second Edition. It’s no longer in print, although companies seem to be able to find copies somehow when I come in to present at their sales kick-offs and other events.  (I will write about the whole nasty Kaplan situation one day.  In the meantime, anyone considering publishing with Kaplan needs to give me a call.)

I was thinking about putting How Winners Sell up on Amazon’s Kindle. After a long, long effort, I finally got the rights back.  I wrote the Second Edition in 2004, but most of it is still very relevant.

The proposition.  Here is a free chapter.  All I ask is if you get some value from it and are interested in reading the whole book on either the Kindle or an e-Book format, let me know.  I may decide to republish it.

Strategy 18: Become an Expert at Competitive Positioning

I don’t know about you, but I get a big thrill when I watch a high-integrity, seasoned sales pro competitively position his company and offering. It may happen during a presentation or during a sales call as objections are raised by the buyer.

When you think about it competitive positioning begins when you formulate your strategy. From that point onward, your messaging, talking points and objection handling are driven off the same thing—the unique value you can provide to your client.

Here are some examples of how winners I’ve worked with masterfully handle competitive positioning:

Situation 1: Selling Against Goliath

If you sell for a smaller company that competes against the big guys, the age-old story of David and Goliath might come to mind. In this story, the giant, Goliath, was beaten in a fight by the small boy, David. I often see “Goliaths” beaten, but it takes flawless execution of a well-designed plan.

The most important thing of all when selling against a much bigger competitor is to be certain that if you meet or exceed all the prospect’s requirements, that size—for size’s sake—does not matter. That’s an issue of qualification. You may have the best product, innovative service capabilities, committed people, stellar customer satisfaction levels, top product quality, most respected investors or anything else that you consider of value, but if size matters, little else will measure up. And if size does matter, and you can’t convince your prospect fairly quickly that it shouldn’t, you need to get out of there—and quickly on to another opportunity. Know your prospect’s history regarding doing business with smaller companies. It may mean nothing to them, since they do it all the time. On the other hand, you may be the first and may have a long, bumpy road ahead.

What all this means is that there are certain opportunities for which you should not compete, because you can’t win them. Sorry, but that’s a fact.

Now What Do You Do?

You’re going to need to influence your prospect’s decision criteria, so that the perceived value of your competitor’s size as well as other size-related capabilities are diluted, neutralized or, in the best case, seen as a disadvantage. Many salespeople are accustomed to highlighting a competitor’s weaknesses. In the situations where you are competing against a bigger company, you will (professionally and subtly) dilute their strength.

Here is a simple, well-proven example. Let’s say I sell for a smaller professional services firm and I am up against a major player. Based upon preferences and needs of the buyers, I may decide to use the “small-fish-in-a-big-pond” approach.

It goes like this: “Ms. Prospect. There are few people who would not be impressed by my competitor’s size, global reach and financial as well has human resources. I’m sure they proudly reference some very prominent customers. However, you might consider that a project such as yours, although highly critical for you, might very well not have the same level of importance for them and therefore may not generate the ongoing attention within executive levels of their company that their premier customers’ projects would. It’s only natural…”

From that point, you would discuss how you would meet their technical requirements and establish a business relationship going forward, stressing attention that would be paid to the progress by your executives. You’d convince them that your company’s success would depend directly on their success, not the other way around. You’ll be portraying them as big fish in a small pond, with the driving message being how important their business is to you.

If you are effective with this approach, you will have moved down in importance the size and impressiveness of their customer list and up in importance the attention paid to them by your executives as well as your company’s interest in their success.

Here are challenges you might face in a David and Goliath situation and some alternatives to consider:

Challenge: The competition questions your viability to the prospect. “What would happen to you, Mr. Prospect, if they were to go out of business or be acquired?”

Your Response: Don’t wait for this to happen, as it most likely will. Immunize. Exploiting their opponent’s size is the first card most salesreps who sell for large companies—the Goliaths—play against the smaller guys. You need a solid story, prepared in advance – concise and compelling – which must be credibly and sincerely delivered first by you, then echoed by your most senior executives. Mitigating perceived risk is on the critical path to success when competing against a much larger rival. Don’t wait.

Challenge: The competition attempts to expand the scope of the evaluation into areas where you don’t have a solution.

Your Response: Again, pretty standard practice for the big guys. Alert your prospect in advance that this may happen. Praise their efforts in defining their requirements as well as they have. Ask if they are prepared to have the scope of their initiative, project or investment substantially expanded. If they say no, alert them that other vendors may employ this “sales” strategy to differentiate themselves as well as to increase the size of their contracts.

Please understand that I never advocate negative selling, mud slinging or “slamming the competition.” On the other hand, when you have built relationships in your accounts with influential people who are willing to help you, you’ll need to provide them with the messages—the sound bites and talking points—to position your company advantageously.

Challenge: The competition attempts to impress your prospect with hordes of resources to demonstrate their prowess and convey a “safety in numbers” message.

Your Response: Again, prepare your prospect in advance that this may happen. Qualify them on this issue, again. Suggest that these bigger companies have extra resources on board just to impress prospects to make a sale. If you know your competitor’s bid will come in considerably higher than yours, you may want to subtly suggest that using resources to win business may be a reason that their overhead is so high. And, remind the prospect that if they do go with your competitor, the meter will start running.

This approach is mandatory when you compete against companies who lavish prospects with toys, gifts, free trips and other goodies to try to influence their decision.

Challenge: The competition, because they are bigger, is willing to guarantee results in a way that you cannot.
Your Response: They may be able to guarantee that their product will get installed (or service delivered) within a certain time, but what if they don’t? The customer may not have to pay the vendor any more cash, but what about lost business opportunities, reduced customer satisfaction levels and employee morale if things go wrong? Will the guarantee cover that?

Tough qualification combined with strategic competitive selling does work. After confirming that size did not matter in a face-to-face meeting with a division president of a $5 billion corporation, my client, the CEO of a small enterprise software company commanded that his team pursue a $2 million contract competing against a $750 million rival. Now there is a David and Goliath scenario.

I coached that sales team during the nine month sales cycle. Among other things, we diluted the competition’s apparent strengths and portrayed their large size as a liability, which in this case it really was.

My client’s team outsold the competition and won the business. And earned a lot more business after that, because they delivered what they promised to their customer. As the CEO related to me, elated with a contract five times larger than anything his team had secured up to that time, “the most important thing for me is that this process is repeatable.”  [Note: The small company is DBM Systems, Inc., based in Cambridge, Ontario. The CEO was Duncan McLeod.  I did not provide those details in my book.]

Situation 2: Outselling a Competitor Who Slashes Their Price to Win

You’ve just read some suggestions on how to compete against a bigger company who uses their size and strength to win – the Goliath. Now, how do you compete against the smaller, more agile David out there who, for example, drastically discounts at the last minute to win business?

Red Alert. First of all, once you learn that one of your competitors in a deal has “bought” business in the past at a price you could not (or would not) meet, your alert status should immediately shift to red.

Remember, early in evaluation cycles prospects may say that price is a consideration, but not first on their list. Later on, once they have ignored or devalued any unique capabilities that your product or service can provide—to the point where they “can see no measurable difference between your offering and your competitor’s,”—price gets elevated to the number one consideration. We’ve all seen it happen. By that point it’s generally too late to remedy the situation. You’re trapped. So recognizing potential situations early on where a buyer will buy on price must become second nature.

Here are some recommendations that will point you in the right direction:

Qualify. In any competitive sales situation you have to monitor the prospect’s decision criteria like a pilot checks her instruments— ever-vigilantly. During the course of an evaluation decision criteria often change. In fact, aren’t we often the ones who attempt to effect that change to gain competitive advantage?

Among the most critical of all decision criteria these days is price. What are the key evaluators’, buyers’, recommenders’ and decision makers’ requirements and expectations with regard to price today? If you are just getting engaged with a prospect and their number one decision criteria is price, you (or your management) will have to decide whether it’s even worth competing. Clearly, knowledge of your competitor’s historic actual selling price will be critical in this decision. So will an understanding of your prospect’s recent buying patterns with regard to price.

• Buyers focused on price de-emphasize or entirely ignore factors such as:
• Supplier product or service quality
• Supplier viability
• Supplier post-sales support capabilities
• Post sales costs (contributing to total cost of ownership)
• The knowledge and experience a vendor can bring forth
• Areas of additional value that you may be able to provide above and beyond what they have specified
• Quality of vendor personnel
• References

Address the issue head on and early. “Is your company going to make a decision based entirely or substantially on price?”

And please, make sure you are asking these questions of, and selling to, decision makers. All this matters very little to the people at lower levels in organizations.

Educate yourself. Here are just some of the questions for which you need answers to outsell a competitor that dramatically discounts to win business:

• Is their discounting tactical or, in the case of some very successful companies, strategic – a key component of a go to market strategy supported by their business plan? (It’s hard to compete against Sam’s Price Club on price…)
• When do they offer these drastic discounts and under what conditions? How do they dilute the value of what you are selling in the prospect’s eyes?
• How well do they deliver post sales service?
• How often do they produce new products or upgrade their services?
• What is the satisfaction level of their customer base?
• What is their financial position? If they are publicly held, look at their P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement for the most recent quarter and going back in time. (If they are privately held, get your CFO to create a pro forma set of financial statements that might represent what that competitor’s financial position might look like. It provide you with insights into where that competitor’s vulnerabilities lie.)
• What do you know about their human resources? Look into staff and executive attrition rates, quantity and quality of SMEs (subject matter experts), levels of staffing, and customer care hours – anything that will point toward discount-caused reduced margins impacting operating effectiveness.
• Look at their corporate culture. What do they value? Integrity? Quality? Are they doing the right things for building a long, profitable future or are they highly opportunistic, with little regard to what will happen tomorrow?
• Uncover what the competition uses to deflect their prospects from exploring the areas listed above. In technology, you’ll often find that the lowball competitor has the sexiest demo, for example.

One client did a terrific job of figuring out that their competitor’s service and support resources were stretched very thin. Highlighting their own strengths in these areas pointed the prospect in the right direction. As a result of a bit of probing, the prospect found that my client’s competitor couldn’t appropriately support them post-sale. “If they can’t bring people to the party now when they are selling to us, it’ll only get worse if we become their customer,” the prospect told our rep. Bingo.

Discover And Quantify The Value. Whether or not you suspect that a low-price competitor will be included in the bidding process, you’ll need to quantify the value of your offering – in terms of financial return. When you are competing against someone who drastically discounts, it’s especially important to get close to the prospect and really understand their requirements. Not only will that enable you to better position your solution, but, more importantly, you’ll be able to uncover areas of potential additional value for the customer that can be derived from the differentiators that you are selling. If these differentiators are linked to financial impact for the prospect, they are not likely to become expendable nice-to-haves, eliminated from consideration in what might turn out to be a commodity buy. Even if the prospect doesn’t want to or can’t invest in that added value now, you’ve expanded their vision past what your competitor has done and have set yourself up for add-on business later.

Educate and Position. Winners who are really good at competitive selling subtly but definitively alter their prospect’s perception that buying at the lowest price is the prudent thing to do. You can really only do this effectively when you are selling at the appropriate executive levels.

• Talk to the buyer about the challenging business conditions that face all of us, and the natural tendency to buy at the lowest price.
• Talk about companies in the prospect’s as well as your own industry who have gone out of business as a result of tactical discounting, and the impact that had on those companies’ customers. (You need to do some homework here.)
• Implore the prospect to ask questions of the other contenders that will expose weaknesses that result from tactical discounting. (See “Educate Yourself,” above.)
• Educate the prospect on the differences between price, cost and business value and the impact on of those factors on their business. Understand the prospect’s own business model, their culture and how they sell to their customers so you can link your approach to theirs. (If they sell a commodity themselves, at the lowest price, you may have a serious challenge.)
• Immunize the prospect in advance against what will likely be a lowball bid by your competitor. Explain how, when, and why it will happen. Prepare the prospect for what you know will come. Don’t just sit there and wait.
  Convincingly reduce what will likely be price differentials into meaningful, real terms. “Since there is typically a five-year life cycle associated with my product, and it will, admittedly require potentially a $240k additional investment, I figure that comes to 4k per month, which, you have to agree is less than a rounding error (or full-time employee) in terms of the business value we’ve been talking about.”

Get creative. If you haven’t tried risk-sharing, phased deliveries, guarantees or extended warrantees or other creative approaches that will enable you to win the business without discounting, you need to do some brainstorming with your team. Very often a cash strapped competitor who has been discounting to win business falls flat on their face when asked to match such creative selling.

Few of us can afford to sit back and wait for the competition to slash their price and walk away with the business. Understand your customer, your competitor, and your value. Then sell.

© 2004 – 2009 — Dave Stein — All Rights Reserved

Photo credit: © hutch – Fotolia.com

One of the top firms among the 26 sales performance improvement providers ESR covers is Performance Methods, Inc. (PMI).  Founder and managing partner Steve Andersen is recognized as a thought-leader in the demanding and often misunderstood area of strategic account management. (Listen to Steve in an ESR/Podcast.)

To understanding what a strategic account management methodology is you’ve got to look at that old word “strategy.” Your salespeople are simply not going to be able to drive the kind of long-term, mutually profitable relationship with a customer by the seat of their pants, employing  tactics, tips and tricks.  Strategic account management is serious business.  In the U.K. I worked with a Hewlett-Packard SAM whose team of 40 HP account managers serviced a Europe-based global consumer package goods company.  Even your best heavy-hitter sales hunter would fall flat on their face in a business situation like that.  Believe me.

Over the years, ESR has recommended that some of our clients join The Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) for the programs, resources, expertise and ability for their SAMs (strategic account managers) to network with other SAMs.  Steve Andersen is one of the experts that present regularly at SAMA events.

I posed a few questions to Steve as we come into this challenging new year:

Dave Stein: What actions are some of the more strategic of your clients taking during this economic crisis with respect to managing their strategic accounts?

Steve Andersen: Everyone knows that a supplier’s most important assets are their customers, but I continue to be surprised at how little some organizations are doing to become more strategic to their most strategic customers. Despite the economic downturn, many of our clients are investing in best practices that will position them to become more strategic to key customers through the deployment of advanced selling skills and the strategic account management efforts of their sales organization. We’re seeing a renewed commitment to understanding how important customers define value, sell, create and deliver this value, and then follow-up with customized metrics and measures that have meaning and significance to both the customer and the supplier. (Note: ESR audited and certified PMI’s sales performance improvement measurement methodology.)

DS: What are they doing in-house to weather the storm?

SA: Many of our clients are re-assessing their value propositions for their most strategic customers and are now deploying programs that will connect them more directly with what these customers value most. Other are expanding the level of field coaching that they expect from their first and second-level sales managers and equipping them to be more proactive with sales coaching best practices that will help them create value for their reps and salespeople ‘out on the street,  reducing rework in the process. We have several clients with travel restrictions going into effect for 2009, and we’re building customized, blended training and reinforcement programs for them (utilizing WebEx, Sales 2.0, Web 2.0/3D and Second Life technologies) to maintain the momentum of their current training initiatives, and in some cases, to launch new, “next level” initiatives. Other clients are planning to get more out of their investments in CRM solutions, and we’re working actively with them to technologically enable their sales best practices solutions to provide more value to the end-users.

DS: Do you see any new or innovative approaches in the area of strategic account management?

SA: Yes – many! So many, in fact, they PMI is offering a new “sales best practice” solution area to our clients that we refer to as “Innovate to Differentiate.”  Through our client work, we have had the good fortune to observe the best practices of some of the top account managers in the world and have documented and organized our findings in what we call the “Zones of Innovation.” When we observe an innovative best practice, particularly those that either create customer value, provide supplier competitive advantage/differentiation, or as is usually the case, both, we add this to the appropriate “Zone.” In a smaller 2009 market, we believe that innovative best practices can be the difference between winning and losing business, and of all of the innovative best practices that we’re observing, perhaps the “hottest” is planning collaboratively with strategic customers—our clients’ customers, that it.  It’s surprising to see just how much can be gained by simply changing the way that you engage with your customer so that the supplier is more aligned with their customer’s decision process.

DS: What are PMI’s prospects for 2009.

SA: 2008 was one of the most successful years in PMI’s history, and I believe that this was because of the type of value that we are creating for our clients. Much of our work is at the strategic customer/supplier level, as opposed to basic Sales 101—type training, and these types of projects are more important than ever in a down economy. To illustrate, we kicked-off a new client project in November with the SVP of Worldwide Sales taking center stage and informing the audience (his entire sales management team) that he could either “invest in the future” or shut-down all discretionary spending. He explained that his decision was the former and he made it quite clear that he expected them to do their part and win a “bigger piece of a smaller pie” in 2009. This client is deploying several of PMI’s SAM programs. This evaluation was quite competitive, with several vendors covered by ES Research in the mix, as well as an incumbent “strategy consultant.” With clients like this, we are forecasting another strong year in 2009.

Note: ESR has found that many sales training providers do not have specific methodology, curricula and content for strategic account management programs.  Yet, they try to convince their buyers that they do.  In 2009 ESR will target coverage of challenges and solutions around strategic account management and the providers that excel in that discipline. This is the first part in a series.

Disclosure: Performance Methods, Inc. subscribes to ESR’s research.

Photo credit: © Jason Branz – Fotolia.com

I’ve been very critical of sales tips during the past six months.  My column in Sales and Marketing Management Magazine about it as well.

The simple reason is that sales tips keep salespeople and their managers focused on tactics and shortcuts rather than investing the time and effort required for planning and executing a strategic approach to sales performance improvement.

When we interview high-performing salespeople, what we consistently find is their success comes as much from who they are as what they do.  The foundation of their Personal Capital—a rep’s unique customer-valued amalgam of skills, experience, contacts and knowledge—is their customers’ trust in them.   And with respect to the companies for which those top performers work—integrity is consistently the number one or number two attribute sales people must possess.

When it comes to the subject of trust in selling there is no better source of knowledge, insight and practical advice than Charlie Green.  His wonderful book, Trust-Based Selling, is one every sales manager should read.  But let me warn you.  This isn’t a typical sales tips book to be skill-skimmed or speed-read.

Trust-Based Selling can be a key component of a strategic initiative to upgrade the quality and resulting performance of the individuals on your sales team.  Once you read this book, I don’t believe you’ll look at the subject of trust in selling in the same way ever again.

Photo credit: © Lisa F. Young – Fotolia.com

I’ve heard the term “rolling disclosure” a few times on the political TV shows recently.

So far as I can tell, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was the first to use the term in 2001.  Matthews:  “He told us what he knew as soon as he knew it, not when it suited him. There was no ‘rolling disclosure,’ no politician out there telling us what he wanted us to know when he wanted us to know it.”

Airlines Regularly Roll Disclosure

We’ve all experienced rolling disclosure with the airlines:

1. You check in at the kiosk.  The display above indicates that the flight will leave on time.
2. You get to the gate, and the display says it’s now going to be 30 minutes late.
3. You go online and check on another airline’s flight.  It leaves in an hour.  Might as well stay here and wait for this one, right?
4. Forty-five minutes go by.  Too late to catch the other flight.
5. Right then your flight comes up on the screen as being an additional hour late.  Are you kidding me?
6. Continue to loop back to step #3 until there are no options left.

Do the airlines use a deliberate rolling disclosure strategy so their passengers won’t rebook on another carrier?  I don’t have the time or interest in proving it, but I do know that the airlines have a much better understanding than they let on as to when incoming flights (your outbound flights) will be arriving.  They know that if they told you right off that your flight was going to be 2 1/2 hours late you’d switch to another carrier’s flight.  Angry yet?

Some Salespeople Roll Disclosure, Too.

We’ve observed rolling disclosure with salespeople when they were faced with the uncomfortable task of delivering bad news to a customer.  When times are tough and selling is more challenging, such as it is right now, it’s counter-intuitive for a salesperson to share all the bad news with the customer immediately.  The salesperson thinks, “If I dump all this bad news on them now, they’ll dump me.  Here’s what I’ll do.   Today I’ll tell them we don’t have the color they want.  Next week I’ll tell them about the delivery delays…”  Wrong.  By the time the customer wonders if there is any more bad news, you’ve likely lost their trust and the sale.

There are three reasons for immediate and full disclosure.  First, it’s the right way thing to do.  Second, you’ll want your salesperson to tell the customer the (whole) story before their competitor spins it to their own benefit.  Third, your customer will not like rolling disclosure at all.  Think delayed flights.  It will anger your customer, just as it does you.

Photo credit: © Sam Downes – Fotolia.com

My friend Alan Ganapol says, “Always read the signs.  They’re out there.  You just have to read them.”

The signs today came in the form of notices that two of my recent articles were published.  They’re both on essentially the same subject. I felt compelled to share those with you.

The first article is in Business & Leadership, a Irish print and online magazine.  It’s entitled, appropriately enough, No Easy Answers. 

The second is my November/December column for Sales and Marketing Management magazine.  That one is When Sales 101 Isn’t Enough.

Yesterday I spoke with Dan Brown, VP of Marketing at Payformance.  I love talking to Dan because he’s a marketing guy that really understands selling.  When I consulted with MAPICS a number of years ago, Dan was on the marketing team and did some very effective work around competitive positioning and customer value quantification.  Dan, with great support from Al Barrenechea, enabled MAPICS to be quite competitive under some very tough circumstances.

Dan and I commiserated about the uphill battle getting sales leaders to understand that sales effectiveness isn’t something you can accomplish quickly or easily.

But there are those that get it.  Here’s a nice email I received just this afternoon:

Hello, Dave.

FANTASTIC article on “Sales 101 Isn’t Enough.”

Spot on.

We pride ourselves at the American Heart Association to go beyond the basics. I wish I could tell you we are all at the advanced level. Not yet. But hopefully on our way there.

Much thanks for your insight. I made it a point to seek out your website and subscribe to your blog on my personal email.

Looking forward to your next pearl of wisdom.

Happy Thanksgiving.

E. Scott Murphy
National Consultant, Affiliate Corporate Prospecting
National Corporate Relations

American Heart Association National Center

Scott’s email is another sign.  It’s a good time to give, even a little.  If not the American Heart Association, then your favorite charity.

Donal Daly, CEO of The TAS Group, wrote a great post (Early failure is better than late failure) on his company’s blog that is more than worthy of your consideration. (Disclosure: The TAS Group is a subscriber to ESR’s research.)

In the post Donal discusses the not-often-enough-overcome challenge of effective qualification.  From the post:

When budgets are tight – as they are in times like this – opportunities are sometimes hard to come by.  When that happens you’re tempted to chase anything that moves, succumb to demands for extortionate discounts, or throw in extra products for free.  All this does is make it harder to make your number.  You will need to do more deals to reach your quota, and as word gets around of the deals you are prepared to do you enter the death spiral.

Easy for you to say, you might think.  With so many fewer deals out there, you’re telling me to have my salespeople qualify harder and eliminate some of those potential opportunities? you continue. 

Precisely.

So why isn’t effective qualification something every salesperson does automatically, like eating, breathing, and submitting expense reports? 

I see three predominant reasons: 

First of all, it’s not in many salespeoples’ DNA.  Optimism is often considered a critical trait for a salesperson.  For many salespeople, denial is only one small baby step from optimism.  They don’t ask the tough questions because they don’t want to hear the answers.  (It was Mark Twain who said, “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”  He wasn’t a sales consultant, but probably could have been with such an insightful remark.)

Secondly, some subset of you, their managers, also don’t want to hear the truth.   Alexander Pope wasn’t a sales consultant either, but with his observation that “Hope springs eternal,” he could have fooled me.

Finally—and I think Donal will jump aboard on this one—there is too often no method (accompanied by the appropriate learning and tools) provided to sales people for them to effectively qualify opportunities.

During these challenging times, can your sales team to raise their hit rate against the smaller number of opportunities that may be available to them?  If not, you’ve got to take a serious look at your total approach to qualification. 

Photo: © James Steidl – Fotolia.com

No matter what side you were on, here are a few observations, affirmations and truths, post-election, with respect to selling:

1. Strategy and tactics are equally important.  The purpose of executing tactics in a sales campaign is to drive a well-founded strategy.  Tactics without a strategy is like playing darts with your eyes closed.
2. Message! Not messages, messages, messages.  Decide what you are going to count on to win based upon research—a focused, objective assessment of the sales opportunity.
3. You can successfully change the ground rules even if you temporarily lose ground.
4. The understanding and leverage of political influence is crucial.
5. Messages must be clear, concise and compelling and paint the vision of a better situation for the buyer.  One fumbled message can dilute the impact of a hundred perfect ones.
6. Logic and the facts aren’t the only things buyers consider.
7. Discipline rules.  Seat-of-the-pants doesn’t. 
8. Knowledge of your opponent’s plan to win is vital for devising and refining your own plan.
9. Direct and blatant “bad-mouthing-the-competition” doesn’t generally work. 
10. Never underestimate the underdog.
11. Want to win?  Look the part.
12. Tell the truth before your opponent exaggerates it.
13. Choose the right team.  The salesperson is CEO of their own virtual sales corporation.  Whom they choose to stand next to them and to advise them can make a big difference.
14. Whomever has momentum at the time of close generally wins.  Its very difficult to build momentum just at the right time without a plan.
15. Embrace technology. It permeates pretty much everything most of us do.
16. Go broad and deep into the customer’s organization as appropriate. (Ideally effective marketing will have blazed the trail in advance. See the article How Better Marketing Elected Barack Obama.  Thanks, John Caddell.)  Build consensus where it matters.
17. Don’t lose your composure or violate your own principles.
18. Understand that energy, determination and relentless pursuit of the goal is the fuel that powers the engine.

I’m sure I missed some points.  What would you add to this list?

By the way, Newsweek’s Secrets of the 2008 Campaign has been published on their website.  It looks like a terrific read.  I haven’t tackled it yet, but I definitely will.

Photo:  © Ljupco Smokovski – Fotolia.com

When I wrote How Winners Sell one of the most important messages I needed to communicate to my readers was this:  The timeless truth about sales is it’s all about money.  B2B sales is not about selling software or strategic advice or capital equipment.  It’s about your products and services improving your customer’s business.  I was very lucky to have learned that early in my sales career.

Many of the Tier One sales training companies don’t cover this subject.  They tell you that you have to sell high, get access to influencers, understand business challenges and opportunities.  But they don’t tell you what to do once you have that information and you’ve gotten access to those top-level executives.  This isn’t a problem if you fill that gap some other way.

During the time I was a sales consultant, I recommended to a number of clients that they put their salespeople and managers through business acumen training.  First, we helped each company assess the requirements of their customers with respect to business value justification.  Then, we went about building the right tools: business cases, customer testimonials that included specifics about the improvement they realized, ROI models, strategies and tactics for gaining and maintaining access to financial and business managers.  Then the reps were put through the training.  Finally the reps were coached and supported until business value justification became a standard component in every sales cycle.  In every case, the CEO and VP of Sales were convinced that there was a substantial improvement in sales performance.  (Unfortunately I couldn’t convince them to formally measure their return on investment in those initiatives.  Ironic.)

There are a few training companies that understand the importance of business acumen and are focused entirely on that subject.  One is Executive Conversation.  ESR has formally reviewed them.  You can listen to a fabulous podcast that I conducted with the CEO and one of their consultants.

Last week I received an email from Paradigm Learning about a white paper they just released (PDF).  They specialize in business acumen and learning.  I don’t typically provide links to white papers (here’s why), but this is an important enough issue for me to break my own rule.  This white paper discusses a broader view of business training than just sales.  This paragraph gets to the heart of the matter:

During a business acumen session, new managers at a major retailer found out just how difficult it is to make a profit. Their facilitator used this example: A warehouse employee dropped several cases of lightbulbs. The bulbs shattered and so did the opportunity to make a $25 profit. The first reaction of the class was, “So what’s $25 to us?” But after calculating the company’s net income at just over 1 percent, they realized that the store would have to sell $2,500 in new merchandise to make up for the lost profit on the shattered bulbs! 

Is your sales team business savvy enough to gain and maintain access with key business executives?  Can they:

• Determine, by reviewing your customer’s financial statements, whether your products or services can drive business improvement and generally by how much?
• Talk about the specific business impact your products and services have had on your other customers?
• Mitigate a customer’s focus on price by bringing the conversation to a higher, more impactful level?
• Work closely with the customers financial staff to enable them to construct a credible ROI model for your products/services?

Or better yet, try Executive Conversation’s fluency assessment.

Business acumen for B2B sales people has never been more important than now.  Prove to your customer how you will get them through these challenging times and they’ll get you through them in return.

Photo: © James Steidl – Fotolia.com