Posted by Bob Apollo on Sun, Jul 25, 2010
BANT, in case anyone is unfamiliar with the acronym, stands for Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline. It’s commonly used in the sales qualification process. But I’ve come across a few too many situations recently where sales people were routinely rejecting marketing leads because they weren’t “BANT Ready”. I’ve also been pitched by telemarketing agencies offering “BANT-qualified deals”.
I want to explain why that’s a really bad idea.
But before I do, it’s probably worth confirming that I'm thinking primarily about new business opportunities involving complex, long buying cycle product or service offerings here, rather than simple transactional sales that might be concluded in a single call.
Of course BANT matters...
I have no problem with the idea that, before a complex sale can be concluded, budget, authority, need and timeline all have to exist. But sales people need to be creating BANT, not expecting BANT to be served up on a plate for them. Here’s why: by the time budget, authority, need and timeframe have been established, it’s highly likely that another vendor’s fingerprints are all over the deal.
Think back to any unanticipated RFPs you might have received over the past. How many did you win? Unless you manage to dramatically reshape the prospect’s requirements, studies suggest that if you win more than 1 in 20 of such deals you’re doing better than average. The dice are already loaded against you, and you’re just serving as “column fodder” to make up the numbers.
Your sales people need to create BANT not wait for it...
Instead of hoping that fully-qualified, BANT-ready deals can be uncovered, your sales and marketing teams need to be working together to connect with prospects that have unmet needs that they cannot afford to ignore, and for which you happen to have an economically attractive solution. Even better if your actions serve in some way to create the need, or elevate its importance.
Of the four components of BANT, it’s pretty obvious that need has to come first. It’s also clear that identifying a need is your entry point into the opportunity. But your sales people must be careful not to leap straight from an identified need to proposing their solution. They must use the freshly uncovered need to develop the other three factors, and to establish the economic case for change.
Establishing the economic case for change...
Merely identifying a need is, of course, no guarantee that the prospect will do anything about addressing it. First, they must establish an economic case for change. By helping them, you can identify the likely source of budget and authority, and determine whether a time-critical event exists - or can be created.
Start by exploring the consequences of the issue, and identifying who else is affected. Don’t stop at the first-level implications - keep probing and developing your stakeholder map until you’ve built a complete picture. Work with the prospect to flesh out the costs or lost revenues associated with the situation - the more specific the better.
If the issue is relatively new, help them fully understand the potential impact. If the issue has been obvious to them for a while, find out why they haven’t dealt with it before - and what’s changed to elevate its importance now. Ask them how the company goes about making recent similar decisions - and what distinguished the projects that were approved from those that stalled.
If your initial contact doesn’t know some of the answers - and hopefully they won’t - take advantage and secure their help to reach out through the organisation to others who are affected. Remain consultative. Keep asking questions. Refuse the temptation to propose your solution until you’ve helped them establish whether there is an economic case for change.
Back to BANT...
The process of establishing the economic case for change, assuming that one exists, enables you to use the need you have uncovered to understand and influence budget, authority and timeframe. Your pursuit of consequences will enable you to more effectively influence their requirements - and align your capabilities accordingly. And you’ll be in a much better position to determine if the opportunity is real, whether you want to pursue it, and whether you can win.
Don’t wait for another vendor to establish BANT. Don’t brief your telemarketing agency to focus primarily on discovering BANT-ready deals. Don’t let your sales people demand only BANT-qualified leads. Focus on uncovering the need, developing the requirements, and on developing the economic case for change.
You’ll find your company in the driving seat in a far higher percentage of deals - and you’ll shorten your sales cycles and increase your win rates at the same time. Oh, and you’ll be more confident about “no bidding” those unexpected RFPs you had no chance of winning anyway.
Posted by Bob Apollo on Fri, May 07, 2010
As we emerge from the downturn, it’s clear that we’re going to have to find new and better ways of reaching and satisfying our customers. The May 2010 edition of the McKinsey Quarterly reports that “the way businesses buy from and sell to each other is changing”.
No great surprise there. The article explores three trends that McKinsey’s analysts heard from senior sales executives. Now the nature of McKinsey’s sample is such that the results reflect the experience of some of the world’s largest and best established companies – but my own observations suggest that a growing number of successful up-and-coming organisations are already embracing their recommendations.
The “end of the road warrior”?
One prediction in particular caught my attention. Under the heading “the end of the road warrior”, McKinsey pointed out that many sales organisations have built new, lower cost channels to serve smaller customers. But siloed approaches in which low-value deals are served through a low-touch channel and high-value deals are served through a high-touch direct sales operation are proving - with good reason – to be unnecessarily rigid and increasingly ineffective.
Part of the reason – as McKinsey point out – is that many of the stakeholders and decision makers involved in the buying process have become more relaxed about where and how they get the information they need to support their decision-making.
Time for a blended approach...
For high-value products with complex and lengthy buying cycles, it’s clear that “one-size-fits-all” go-to-market models are hopelessly inadequate to serve today’s buying behaviours. But it’s equally apparent that rigid demarcation lines that force buyers down specific sales paths according to the value and perceived complexity of their transaction aren’t satisfactory either.
Surely it’s time for a blended approach – one that enables prospects to get the information they need in order to advance their buying process through the medium that they feel most comfortable with. Rigidly distinctions between inside and outside sales, or direct, indirect and web-based channels aren’t going to help. Today’s most progressive sales and marketing organisations are thinking “outside in” around how best to facilitate each prospect’s buying decision making process rather than “inside out” around how it might be most internally convenient for them to organise.
Establishing multiple touch points...
We need to establish multiple touch points that can satisfy our prospects and facilitate their buying processes. Sometimes our prospect’s needs might be best served through face-to-face interaction, at other times through a remote conversation, and at still other times through their ability to “self serve” the information they need.
Our decisions need to be guided by a deep understanding of how – given the dynamics of today’s buying environment – our prospects prefer to receive the information they need during each phase of their buying process in order to facilitate a decision to move forward with us to the next stage. And, of course, we need to be guided by an appreciation of the costs to us and the value to our prospects of each mode of each interaction. The goal must be to provide the greatest utility to our prospects in the way that makes the best use of our resources.
Aligning compensation with desired behaviour...
It’s likely that many people could contribute to a successful sale in this new blended model. And knowing - for sales people in particular – that compensation strongly influences behaviour, it’s important to think through the implications of a fair compensation model that motivates winning behaviour.
Just as the first past the post voting model seems to have failed the British electorate, simple compensation models that encourage traditional “it’s my deal” behaviours are likely to be counter-productive. Successful organisations seem to be incorporating incentives that reward collaboration and a shared contribution to sale success.
So – is the era of the road warrior really at an end?
Yes and no. We are certainly observing a decline in traditional go-it-alone, sales heroics based, road warrior behaviours – but we’re also observing great success in organisations that have successfully created a blended model in which face-to-face interaction is retained where it delivers value to both the prospect and the vendor, and is complemented by alternative methods of interaction where they better support the buying process.
Effective use of technology is clearly a critical factor – to support both remote and self-service interactions. And there’s no doubt about the attraction of reducing travel costs and avoiding the suffocating and unpredictable grip of Icelandic volcanoes. Complex, high-value sales will still depend on the power of personal interaction. But that power will be amplified and focused through the intelligent use of multiple touch points.
Posted by Bob Apollo on Wed, Apr 28, 2010
Your customers, and your prospects, have opinions - and they are fascinated by the opinions of their peer groups and others they have come to trust for advice. They no longer have to rely simply upon the views of people and organisations they already know – our networked world has made it easy for them to seek and share opinions on a global scale.
The term “word of mouth” marketing is something of a quaint misnomer. One-to-one verbal communication is only one of its' manifestations. The phrase is now commonly (and, I think, appropriately) used to describe customer-to-customer communications across a variety of media that share a common characteristic – the participants have no direct personal economic interest in the information they are exchanging, simply a desire to share what they have learned for the common good.
Time to shove “push marketing” to one side...
As the April 2010 issue of the McKinsey Quarterly points out, customers have become increasingly sceptical about traditional “push” marketing techniques and prefer to make their purchasing decisions based on information that is independently sourced, rather than what the vendor or their sales person tells them. Whilst the McKinsey article has a primarily B2C perspective, the principles are equally - perhaps even more - relevant to the B2C environment.
Word-of-mouth particularly critical in new markets...
One conclusion, in particular, really resonates - and the implications could be profound for B2B marketers. McKinsey identified a significant difference in the power of word-of-mouth between mature and new markets. Although advertising and previous product usage continued to be the primary drivers of consideration in mature markets, word-of-mouth was the most important factor at every stage of consideration in new markets.
Let’s consider the implications for a moment – if you are involved in a new, innovative or disruptive technology, or if you are competing in new markets where you have to create, clarify or elevate your prospect’s needs before you can satisfy them, the quality of the word-of-mouth that surrounds your company and your products and services may now be the biggest single influence on whether you get considered, whether you get evaluated, and whether you get chosen.
Amplifying word-of-mouth equity...
And note that it’s the quality of the word-of-mouth, more than the quantity that affects the power of the communication. McKinsey’s research showed that a high-impact recommendation from a trusted source conveying a relevant message is up to 50 times more likely to trigger a purchase than a low-impact recommendation.
The authors go on to identify three components of word-of-mouth equity: what is being said, who is saying it, and where they are saying it. Let’s consider each of these briefly:
- What is being said is the foundation of effective word-of-mouth marketing: we need to find and focus on the elements that most influence buying decisions
- Next comes who is saying it: as McKinsey point out, the receiver must trust the sender and believe that they have relevant experience for their comments to be valid
- Finally, where they are saying it, because the environment within which the comments are being circulated has a considerable impact on the power of the messages
Applying this to the B2B environment...
We can clearly learn from these B2C experiences and best practices. So how do they change the agenda for those of us who are focused on the B2B environment? Here’s how I’d recommend you might amplify your word-of-mouth:
- Be clear about your prospect’s primary considerations when they start searching for solutions. Conversations with both your installed base and recent new customers – and specifically those in your “sweet spot” – can help. What were the things that were most important to them as they researched the market? What were the trigger events that caused them to start looking?
- Identify the trusted sources that your current customers and prospects rely on for insight and advice. Are there particular organisations or individuals that stand out? How important are analysts, journalists, trade bodies, or their other existing suppliers?
- What about their networks – formal and informal, online and offline? Are they members of relevant trade or professional organisations? How has their network landscape changed, and how do they expect it might continue to change?
You’ll find that you customers and prospects appreciate being asked. They might well be intrigued as to why you are asking. And I can guarantee that you will lean much that is of value.
Why this is worth it...
There’s a key reason to believe that mastering word-of-mouth can establish compelling competitive advantage: the ability for any vendor to outperform their peers in traditional marketing is limited, because the gains from superior performance in a broadly-mastered discipline are slim. But with so few companies truly mastering word-of-mouth marketing, the opportunities to dramatically outperform your competitors by mastering this new discipline are truly profound.
Are you deliberately factoring word-of-mouth into your B2B marketing programmes? I’d welcome the chance to learn from your experiences – and I’d be happy to share what I’ve learned. You can contact me here.
Posted by Bob Apollo on Tue, Mar 30, 2010
Is your offering a discretionary purchase for your customer? Do you often find yourself having to create needs? Does your true competition include not only other similar vendors, but also other completely different projects, and the possibility that the prospect will decide to “do nothing”?
Are your sales pipelines clogged up with opportunities that have expressed interest but now seem to be going nowhere? Do deals get stuck at critical points in the buying cycle? And are your sales people reporting that their “usual suspects” are nearly ready to close – quarter after quarter?
It’s a common situation. And the common explanation is that what you have to offer may be interesting enough for your prospects to want to learn more, but that their current situation is not yet uncomfortable enough for them to conclude that they have to act...
Challenging the status quo
Most systems – and most organisations – have a tendency to perpetuate the status quo unless challenged by a critical need to change. And today’s risk-averse climate has had the effect of raising these invisible organisational barriers to change.
Risk aversion hasn’t necessarily dimmed your prospect’s curiosity or their desire to educate themselves about trends that might affect them. But it has made it harder for vendors to persuade their prospects to convert curiosity into action, and to make a purchase decision.
In the void between pain and ambition
Most discretionary business purchases are driven by one of two motivations – to either solve an existing problem or to take advantage of a new opportunity. They are catalysed by either pain or ambition.
But unless and until the problem is acute enough, or the opportunity compelling enough, no purchase will be made. Conversations may certainly continue – and sales people may come to believe they are making progress. They may even hope that a deal is in the offing.
The opportunity will remain trapped in this widening void between pain and ambition until the economic consequences of failure are so blindingly obvious to the prospect that all the stakeholders involved can align around making the decision to take action.
Identifying the economic consequences
The nature of many discretionary purchases is such that the organisation may not already have a budget set aside for them. The budget will have to be found – and since it is unlikely to be created out of thin air, the probability is that the money will have to be redirected from some other source.
But before this can happen, and even if the new initiative appears to support a strategic priority of the organisation, the economic consequences of a failure to act must be crystallised and acknowledged by the prospect. Having a robust ROI is not enough to secure a purchase decision – prospects have to associate a painful economic consequence with preserving the status quo.
“Who else is affected?”
The status quo creates its own supporters naturally, but change has to recruit its champions. So it’s critically important - once pain or ambition is acknowledged by the initial contact within the prospect - that the sales person identifies other stakeholders who are affected by the issue, and finds reasons to connect with them.
The goal here must be to establish a network of affected and influential stakeholders, each of whom has declared a vested interest in dealing with the issue. And whilst paying attention to the most senior decision maker is clearly a critical factor, given the growing number of people involved in today’s decision making processes, winning a groundswell of influential support can make the difference between securing an order or being told that the prospect has decided to “wait and see”.
Avoiding the void
So how can vendors avoid the void between pain and ambition? I’d like to offer five recommendations:
- Ensure that you understand the nature of your prospect’s problem or opportunity - and if you can’t find a compelling one, ask more questions or qualify out. Focus on the economic consequences, and the cost of inaction
- Use every acknowledged problem or opportunity to explore who else is affected, and how. Systematically build a network of involved stakeholders
- Apply a zero value to opportunities in your sales pipeline unless and until the prospect has acknowledged an economic consequence which is at least as large as the cost of acquiring your solution
- Actively manage your sales pipelines with brutal honesty rather than misplaced hope. Base pipeline stages on buying behaviour rather than sales activities. Insist on observable evidence of a change in the prospect’s commitment before promoting them from one stage to the next in your pipeline
- If you find that a prospect is stuck in the void between pain and ambition, recognise that this is a problem and brainstorm strategies to resolve it. If you can’t, resolve to nurture that prospect until the problem can be elevated, and look for other opportunities that have stronger motivations to act now rather than in the future
A final thought
In this area, as in so many others, hope is not a strategy. Adopting a systematic approach to qualifying sales opportunities and managing sales pipelines is more important than ever.
It’s possible to be so close to your current sales and marketing processes that you fail to see the wood for the trees. You might be surprised by what insights an external perspective can bring. I’d be happy to share what I’ve learned with you.
Posted by Bob Apollo on Thu, Mar 11, 2010
The past year has provided abundant evidence that driving sales people to "sell harder" and hoping that this will boost revenues is an out-of-date and ineffective strategy in a world of increasingly well-informed and generally risk-averse B2B buyers.
It's clear that sales people are having to sell smarter - and to ensure that they can diagnose and deal with the obstacles that might be preventing their prospects from making buying decisions.
Successful sales people, and successful sales teams, exhibit a superior ability to eliminate the common barriers that would otherwise prevent their prospects from making buying decisions. They take pains to identify how and why their prospects choose to buy, and what they need to do to straighten the path and remove the obstacles that might stand in their way.
What sets them apart is their ability to think about the problem of winning more business in terms of helping to facilitate their prospect’s buying process, rather than the increasingly unproductive approach of simply trying to push their sales people to close more aggressively. In short, they have chosen to sell and market smarter, rather than harder – by facilitating the buying process.
The B2B buying process...
During each phase in their buying decision process, your prospect will be faced with the choice of staying where they are, advancing to the next phase in the buying process, or abandoning the journey altogether. The checkpoints that mark the prospect’s transition from one phase to the next provide observable evidence of the true status of their buying journey.
For reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has been responsible for coming up with an accurate sales forecast, finding evidence of the prospect’s passage through each checkpoint is a much more reliable way of assessing progress than the traditional approach of relying largely on self-reported sales activity which may have little relationship to the prospect’s propensity to buy.
Measuring flow and leakage...
Sales pipelines share a number of characteristics with their industrial equivalents – they are prone to problems with both flow and leakage. Flow measures the amount of time an opportunity takes to pass through each stage in the pipeline. Leakage measures the percentage of opportunities that fall out of the pipeline at each stage. Taken together, these two metrics are proving critical to identifying the most common barriers to buying.
Extended stage times – slow flow – can indicate a lack of urgency, or a failure on the part of the vendor to provide the prospect with the timely information they need to have before moving forward to the next phase. High leakage rates – particularly towards the end of the process – can indicate a failure to elevate useful or important needs to urgent.
Removing the obstacles...
A careful analysis of sales pipeline flow and leakage invariably highlights a handful of places where significant numbers of opportunities are either getting stuck or falling out of the pipeline. Once the underlying causes have been identified (we use a number of different methods) then these can be addressed through targeted programmes aimed at eliminating these barriers to buying.
The messages and programmes necessary to remove these roadblocks depend on the nature of the obstacle. Some early-stage obstacles are best addressed through better targeted marketing campaigns designed to self-qualify opportunities according to their true potential. Towards the end of the pipeline targeted sales tools can be highly effective in reinforcing urgency, reducing risk, and highlighting the consequences of deciding to do nothing.
An evidence-based approach...
Adopting an evidence-based approach eliminates much of the guesswork and wishful thinking associated with many sales acceleration initiatives. Companies who are able to reliably determine exactly where the prospect is in their decision-making process (and how they might be helped forward to the next stage) are in a much better position to target sales and marketing resources on the things that will facilitate the buying process and move the sale forwards, avoid wasted effort and reinforce prospect goodwill.
Consider this...
What are the common barriers to buying in your markets? What are the factors that determine whether or not a prospect moves forward to the next stage of their buying decision journey with you? Where are the bottlenecks in your sales pipeline where deals get stuck or fall out all together? What can you do to systematically eliminate these obstacles?
Posted by Bob Apollo on Wed, Mar 03, 2010
According to CSO Insights’ recently published annual sales performance optimisation study, the number of sales people making quota and the percentage of sales organisations achieving their revenue targets both declined faster in 2009 than at any time during the past 16 years.
Sales organisations are reporting extended sales cycles, declining win rates, and that a growing number of apparently promising opportunities are ending in “no decision”. At the same time, they observe that their prospect’s budgets appear to be shrinking, that more players are involved in the decision making process, and that their buyers are exhibiting increasingly risk-averse behaviour.
Product hype and sales pressure are losing strategies...
Faced with an increasingly pragmatic mainstream market, claiming better/faster/cheaper product capabilities isn’t going to have much of an impact – it’s become all too easy for competitors to claim “me too” functionality, and anyway, most buyers are looking for solutions they can have confidence in rather than features they might not understand.
It’s becoming equally clear that “selling and marketing harder” isn’t going to improve matters unless a dramatically different approach is taken. Buyers have become immune to hyped-up marketing claims and manipulative sales techniques. Prospects are still keen to learn, but have come to hate being pitched to. We’re all going to have to learn to sell and market smarter.
Re-architecting the sales and marketing process...
Faced with the realities of today’s markets, I’d go so far as to suggest that for many organisations nothing short of a radical re-architecting of their sales and marketing process is going to suffice – based around a profound understanding of today’s prospect priorities and buying processes.
I want to put forward three simple ideas that seem to be delivering dramatic results for the growing number of companies that have embraced them. They all depend upon an important change in mindset, since they revolve around facilitating the buying process - rather than driving the sales process.
1: Evangelise a better future...
The first step is to envision a better future for your customers and prospects, and to articulate the role that your organisation is going to play in helping them achieve it. For maximum impact, this vision needs to be crafted outside-in (around what your solutions can help your customers to accomplish) rather than inside-out (around what you do – much less compelling!).
It’s often said that there is a narrow line between vision and hallucination, but companies who prove to be powerful evangelists with a clear and compelling vision invariably emerge as thought leaders in their markets - and are able to generate a magnetic inbound attraction for potential prospects (and other key members of the BuyerSphere) who want to learn more.
So - what is your vision of a better future for your customers, and what is your role going to be in helping them achieve it? And how are you evangelising this vision to them?
2: Elevate the need for your solution...
You may have identified a prospect need – but unless the need is urgent, you are unlikely to translate this into a decision to buy. This is one of the major reasons why apparently promising opportunities end in a decision to “do nothing”. Interesting needs are often enough to get your solution considered, important needs can drive formal evaluations, but in today’s business environment only urgent needs drive a decision to buy.
Sales people who fail to distinguish between interesting, important and urgent needs invariably end up wasting their time on too many low-quality opportunities – but sales people who are unable to elevate interesting and important needs to urgent ones will end up with too many “no decisions”. Sales trainers talk of the need to identify a compelling event, but in order to create a compelling reason to buy sales people need to get the prospect to associate a significant cost penalty with maintaining the status quo.
So - how would you categorise your prospect’s typical needs as interesting, important or urgent? And what are you doing to elevate the consequences of inaction?
3: Eliminate barriers to buying...
B2B buying decisions typically evolve through a number of key phases, separated by checkpoints that determine the progress that the prospect is making in their decision making process. Most follow a sequence that looks something like this:
Status quo- Recognising the need for change
- Economic consequences identified?
- Investigating possible options
- Exploring potential solutions
- Decision criteria defined?
- Evaluating formal proposals
- Preferred vendor selected?
- Justifying selection decision
- Implementing solution
The buying process can get stuck in any of the phases – and the checkpoints usually prove to be the bottlenecks. Rather than – as conventional thinking might suggest – trying to drive the sales forward, if the vendor has articulated a compelling vision and the sales person has identified an urgent need, they would be better advised to think in terms of identifying and eliminating the barriers to buying.
When this buyer-centric perspective is applied, it’s usually possible to identify a handful of the most common sticking points, and to create revenue roadblock removing programmes to systematically address them.
So – what are the most common barriers to buying in your prospect’s decision making process? And what are you doing in order to systematically eliminate them?
You can download an extended pdf version of this article here...
Posted by Bob Apollo on Thu, Feb 04, 2010
CSO Insights recently released their annual Sales Performance Optimisation study – and the results make for sobering reading. Their global survey of more than 2,800 companies revealed dramatic declines in average sale performance.
According to CSO Insights, the percentage of reps making quota fell from 58.8% to 51.8%, and overall revenue attainment vs. plan dropped from 85.9% to 77.9%. At the same time, lead generation budgets were being frozen or reduced in more than two-thirds of the companies surveyed, training budgets fell, and investments in sales enablement technologies were curtailed.
You can't cut your way to success...
As CSO Insights point out, most firms increased sales quotas from 2008-2009 – and then tried to “cut their way to success” by reducing budgets – a strategy that has manifestly failed. 85% of the firms surveyed have now raised sales quotas again for 2010, without significantly changing their behaviour. You’ve got to wonder whether they are about to have a Groundhog Day experience.
Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Now, I’m not arguing that organisations thoughtlessly throw money at the problem – but I believe the only way that companies are going to dig themselves out of this hole is to get smart and have a ground-up rethink of the sales and marketing process from the buyer’s perspective and eliminate anything that isn’t creating customer value.
Eliminating wasted effort...
It’s not as if there isn’t a lot of well-meaning but wasted effort that could be redirected. The American Marketing Association, in a series of studies, concluded that between 80-90% of all sales collateral played no useful role in the buying process. Frequent failures to get marketing and sales organisations to agree what constitutes a “sales ready lead” cause similarly dramatic wastes of money and effort. Investing huge amounts of effort on deals that at the end of the day decide to do nothing is a third example. You can probably think of many others.
I’m going to suggest that it’s time to take an evidence-based approach that clearly defines the characteristics of your most valuable prospects, identifies their most pressing challenges and aligns them with your most powerful capabilities. But perhaps most important, it’s time to align the sales and marketing process around a deep and profound understanding of how and why your potential customers choose to buy.
Step into your prospects' shoes...
How would they describe their problems or challenges? What triggers their search for a solution? Who do they trust when they are looking for advice? What are the key steps they follow in their buying journey, how can you determine what stage they have reached, and what can you do to persuade them to move forward with you? Equally important, what might be holding them back, and what can you do to remove any barriers that might lie in their way?
Armed with these insights, you can focus your efforts on connecting with the right sort of prospects, and on doing the things that are most valuable to them in their buying process. You can concentrate on the issues that really matter to them, and be in a better position to qualify out prospects that are not right for you (or you for them) far earlier in the cycle, and redirect your efforts towards more profitable activity.
Have intelligent conversations...
You can also equip your sales people to have intelligent conversations with informed prospects, to ask diagnostic questions that reveal the true cause of the prospect’s pain rather than simply treating the symptoms, and to help the prospect solve problems, simplify complexity and manage change.
Technology can help - there are a growing number of promising collaboration, social media, networking and new generation CRM solutions that can help facilitate your prospects buying processes. Training can help to equip your sales people to have intelligent, provocative conversations that stimulate prospects to take a fresh perspective. An integrated approach to campaigns, media and sales can also contribute.
Change your perspective...
But first, you have to get the mindset right. It’s not about selling harder, or trying to do more with less without changing what you do. It’s about making it easier for your best prospects to buy from you. If you can get that right, you can break free from the depressing decline in sales productivity. Because you can be sure that your less-smart, less-agile competitors won’t have grasped the seismic change that is happening around them.
Posted by Bob Apollo on Wed, Jan 13, 2010
What was your 2010 New Year Business resolution? The one I've been hearing most often from Chief Executives and Sales and Marketing leaders is to "get closer to their customers" - which seems like a laudable objective.
Who wouldn't want to? However, it seems that becoming REALLY "customer-centric" or "customer-focused" or "customer aligned" (choose whichever term you prefer) is proving harder than it first appears. The indications are becoming rather too familiar:
- "Customer-Aligned" organisations that still describe themselves in terms of who they are, or what products or services they offer, rather than what they enable their customers to achieve...
- "Customer-Focused" sales people who can't wait to jump in and prescribe their solution the moment the prospect admits to a problem, rather than taking their time to diagnose what may really be going on...
- "Customer-Centric" marketing organisations that still don't have a very clear idea of who their best prospects are, what really matters to them, who they turn to for advice, or how or why they choose to buy...
Dangerous attraction...
The list could go on. It's not because these people, or these companies, refuse to acknowledge the benefits of customer alignment. It's because the systems they work within seem to have a dangerous magnetic attraction that keeps tugging them back to thinking in terms of their company, their products or their services.
I've come to the conclusion that this is a cultural thing, and that changing it is going to require more than sloganising. Where customer-centricity works, there seems to be an institutionalised curiosity about who their most valuable prospects are, what their most pressing issues might be, and how they go about making buying decisions.
The insights within...
The sad thing is, many of these insights already exist with organisations that are struggling to become customer-focused. The front line sales people and other customer-facing employees often have invaluable insights - and would be prepared to share them if only they were asked.
I don't think this is usually an issue of willingness - it's an issue of process. With this in mind, I've recently revamped our methodology to help make it easier for our clients to capture and apply the information.
Download the check list...
But what I'd like to share with you right now is a simple 15-point check-list that captures much of what we've observed. Please download it here. I hope that it might stimulate some fresh perspectives - please drop me a line if you would like to share them with me.
Posted by Bob Apollo on Mon, Oct 19, 2009
Win-loss reports can provide remarkably valuable insights into the mind of your prospects and the ways in which they make their buying decisions.
But you should never, ever, leave sales to conduct the interviews. If you've ever been on the receiving end of the results, you'll know why - but for those of you who haven't...
- When you loose, it was because your price was too high or your product lacked key functionality.
- When you win, it was all down to the strategy and skills of the salesperson.
Either way, you'll never learn what the prospect really thought, because prospects lie to sales people - they can't help it - or they reflect on their post-purchase priorities rather than the things that influenced their decision if, what and how to buy.
It's also likely that the most attention is paid to the closing stages of the sales process - rather than the often more illuminating questions of what triggered the prospect's search for a solution in the first place, what they thought they were looking for, and who they turned to for advice.
It's nigh-on inevitable that nothing new or of any value will be learned from a sales-led win/loss exercise. That's not to say, of course, that the exercise of understanding your prospect's buying process isn't critical - just that there has to be a better way.
First, conduct the win-loss analysis as a structured conversation - not a questionnaire - that encourages the prospect to recall what caused them to start searching for solutions in the first place.
Second, seek to understand how the prospect approached the problem solving process - who was involved, and who did they turn to for advice?
Third, having identified potential solutions, how did they go about getting their organisation to accept the need for change - or if the deal ended in "no decision", what were the barriers to change?
Finally, think seriously about having an external facilitator conduct the conversations. It prevents the prospect's answers being filtered by any preconceptions or vested interests, and almost always results in more truthful - and therefore useful - answers.
Posted by Bob Apollo on Thu, Oct 01, 2009
Nick de Cent, editor of Modern Selling recently asked me if I had any feel for how people are thinking about the economic climate and business prospects looking forward over the next few months. It gave me a chance to step back, reflect, and gather my thoughts.
Here's what I told Nick ... I'd love to hear whether it tallies with what you are seeing and hearing in your own markets:
"According to the messages I hear from the market, it remains tough out there, but some of the projects that have been in limbo since Q4 last year are starting to come back to life. Even in live projects, there remains a big gap between being chosen and getting the order. Many internal champions haven’t yet fully understood how to navigate their pet projects through a financial approvals process that has become much stricter and highly risk-averse. “Deciding to do nothing” remains a common outcome. The vendors that are breaking through have mastered the art of both eliminating the perceived risk of their solution and elevating the negative consequences of doing nothing. Simply exhorting your sales people to “sell harder” is absolutely, definitively, a losing strategy. Instead, they have to focus on eliminating risk and facilitating the prospect’s buying process.
The early adopter market has shrivelled to almost nothing – not because their aren’t still some early adopter individuals out there, but because the companies they work within have become more conservative in approving new projects and new expenditure. So innovative technologies are having to work out how to “cross the chasm” (and talk business, not technology) far earlier in their company’s evolution than was necessary in the past. Start-ups who haven’t mastered this are particularly hard hit, without an installed base or an established service revenue stream to fall back on. But failure is not inevitable – companies that have the discipline to focus on creating genuine customer value (rather than product marketing puffery) are winning business."
What's your perspective? Please share your comments.