Many prospects are suspicious of their potential providers. They feel like someone is always playing fast and loose with the truth. The technique I am writing about today arms your prospect with the right information and questions to give them the edge in the buying process. The trick is that this approach squarely puts your company in the strongest position. This magic trick frames the untruths and partial truths of your competitors.

The 7 Deadly Sins

For us, the 7 Deadly Sins represent the “You Must Not Do’s” of your client making a buying decision in your market space. By establishing what they are, how big a mistake they create and the questions that a prospect should ask when meeting with potential vendors, you have created trust with your prospect as well as educated them on how to avoid really big mistakes.

The following illustration is just an example. I recommend that you develop your own “7 Deadly Sins of Selecting a ______________ Partner” that is relevant to your market and industry. You will be giving the prospect these 7 Deadly Sins, written from their perspective, for them to have and use as they interview other possible competitors to you. Again, this is only an example.

7 Deadly Sins

• Certification – Ask every potential partner if they have the XYZ certification for all of their staff and locations. Many players in our market may have one or two individuals certified, but they do not have their entire staff certified, or their entire facility certified.  If they do not, that is a risk because _____________.
• Diversification – Ask what the experience in your particular industry has been of the frontline people who will be doing the work and ask for background profiles for the management. Often times in the market, there is very little breadth of experience in the teams who come to do the work and all of the experience is in one or two people.
• Specification – What are the three biggest things, specifically and measurably, that you are going to get from working with a new provider? Too many claims are general and soft-cost oriented. A credible provider should be able to quantify the benefits.
• Dedication – Who is the dedicated team that will be doing the work for you? Too often, an executive team does the selling, but a less experienced team does the work. You want to know who is your team.
• Prioritization – What size is this project in the scheme of things? Are you a Top 10 account, or will you be suffering from the 11th+ position problem of priority with your possible provider.
• Concentration – What portion of the business that your potential partner does is in your industry and market? If it is less than X%, then the relevance to your business issues and forward thinking necessary for good partnership just isn’t there.
• Integration – How will the company manage knowledge transfer and cultural match ups? Your business will require integration between people from your company and any partner, do they have a plan that is clear for how that will happen to get the maximum value out of this new relationship, or is it just a punch list and an onboarding schedule?

In building your own list, you are considering all of the untruths and partial truths of your industry. Similar to the 5 Myths, this is designed to give the ‘real story’ to your prospects to make them better buyers. By doing that, you are giving yourself the opportunity to show your real value in a tight and often commoditized marketplace.

“Congratulations, You’re My 11th Biggest Customer”

What’s it like to be someone’s “11th Biggest Customer”?

In the constant sales competition with bigger companies for bigger deals, at some point, if you are smaller, your size is going to become an issue. This can be in an obvious way or in a subtle way- even unstated. However, if you are competing with a company who is much bigger than you are, often that competitor looks like a safer bet than you. You have to turn their size against them- and that’s not easy, it takes a little magic.

Here is the magic trick -

Ask your prospect, “Who is your 11th biggest customer for your company?” As they fumble through the list in their mind, drop in this second question, “What’s it like to be somebody’s 11th biggest customer?”

You’ve set up the conversation about size, trust and promises. Be careful, it would be easy to swing on the point with an eight-pound sledgehammer when just a finishing hammer is necessary. Here’s how the rest of the conversation should go -

You: “Being out of the top 10 shows up in a lot of ways in a business relationship- not always up front, but over time, the bigger clients always get the first attention in any of our businesses. I would encourage you to ask anyone you are considering for this project/program/purchase/partnership where you will fall in the order of size of their clients. Just for reference, you will be my 3rd biggest customer, (fill in the blank with the correct number in the top 10 for your company or your personal book of business).”

It’s simple – we all know that being 11th sucks. Sometimes a prospect needs to be reminded of this fact. Then the prospect needs to be asked to make this reference real to his or her own business. In our own hearts, all of us, prospects included, know that we don’t treat all customers equally. They enjoy that leverage when they have it and resent it when they don’t. This is our chance to drive that point home. Works like magic.

Large account sales success is 90% process and 10% MAGIC…

I spend so much time preaching and teaching “process” that I don’t spend much time in my blogs on the MAGIC that closing big sales takes. I am going to take the next few blogs to teach some of my magic tricks- those things that are not process, but still follow some understandable guidelines so that almost anyone can use these ideas to give leverage to your process and win more deals.

This one is known as “The 5 Myths”. This approach is used when you are in a highly commoditized marketplace and want to differentiate yourself with an experienced buyer. It is also effective when you are a small player and a large competitor has misrepresented things in the marketplace, but has used so much marketing firepower that the message has become the accepted norm.

Step 1: Establish the 5 Myths for your marketplace.

A myth is something that is generally held as truth in your marketplace but is in fact not true. Myths are often times created by big competitors who are trying to own the decision making reference frames of the marketplace and so they push these out into the market through advertising, brochures and other sales materials. The problem is that they work. Let me give a few examples:

• Myth 1: Price = Cost. Now, this is often times not true. When we look at the actual costs of a solution or product there are all sorts of factors to consider including, on-boarding costs, shipping fees, early mistakes and errors, training, hidden charges and so on. Price rarely equals cost. However, for the procurement driven buyer and the savvy competitor this provides great air-cover for making a price choice when the actual cost would be a better comparison.
• Myth 2: Big = Safe. One of the key decision drivers for companies in making buying decisions is safety. Safety is defined first by “Am I personally at risk for making this decision” and progresses from there. Big companies tell their marketplaces about the F.U.D. (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that buyers should consider from working with smaller providers. We know that there is no greater safety with a big company and probably greater risk from a lack of attention.
• Myth 3: RFP Process creates a level playing field. Right….if you were the author of the RFP maybe. RFP processes to do not create level playing fields, quite the opposite, they create unfair competitions that favor the incumbents or those who authored the RFP. We already know this. However, it is a myth that is widely held in large company cultures because it appeases the governance requirements.
• Myth 4: Procurement compliance means cost control. Everyone is concerned with controlling costs. Procurement or purchasing often carries the compliance requirements while the end-users carry the final budget numbers. It is a myth to believe that the accountants can monitor the true costs of implementation of solutions and in that way control costs.
• Myth 5: Certification provides protection. My favorite example of this is ISO, (where English majors find employment after graduation writing fiction). However, ISO is not the only one of these certifications that provides a smokescreen of value in the process. Certification is a starting place for true quality in a system, not an end outcome.

These are all examples, but you can come up with your own. The important thing is that you are showing your prospect behind the false marketing of your marketplace to help them make better decisions, regardless of whether they buy from you or not. All industries have generally accepted falsehoods that cause companies to make bad decisions- what are your industry’s falsehood.

Step 2: Explain why these are myths and what the truth is. For each myth, there is a truth that is hidden from the prospect. What is that truth? One of my clients is an HVAC distributor who finds themselves competing with their own suppliers on big deals! They use this truth in their 5 Myths presentations: The cost of a part is inconsequential to the cost of labor for installation. When the wrong part is in the wrong place, the cost of getting someone out to get that part is many times the price of the part itself. This is especially true on a multi-story building. My client can put the right palette of materials on the right floor and stacked in order of use. The supplier can only put boxes on palettes out at the materials lot on the jobsite. This is a representation of where the myth that price=cost could be dispelled and that the value of the truth overcomes all price differentials.

Step 3: Create a way to tell your story. In the previous example, I talked about the truth of parts and labor. The story sounds like this: “Imagine a $25/hour union contractor on the 4th floor of a new building working on the HVAC. He needs a bag of screws. He gets in the elevator, rides downstairs. He gets off the elevator and lights a cigarette while he’s walking to the materials lot. He gets a phone call and starts talking. Grabs the bag of screws and heads back but decides to get a soft-drink from his truck. Grabs that, lights a second cigarette and heads to the elevator. Gets upstairs and is about to work when he realizes that he is missing a set of vents and starts the process over. How much did that bag of $0.39 screws cost you? Of course you saved $0.02 on it, but it doesn’t offset the labor cost of at least $10. That’s why we put the palette with all the materials in order of use on the floor near the worksites.” By telling your story, you are taking your truth and making it their truth in their working reference frame.

Step 4: Put the key in their hands. I like to give a guide to my prospects at the end of my discussion of 5 Myths for them to use with my competitors in all future conversations. It’s simple- Give them a list of 5-7 questions that they should ask all companies with whom they are discussing this opportunity. The questions should represent an examination you are willing to undergo and should make them better buyers. By asking these questions, they will be able assess truth from myth in their future meetings.

Tips:

1. Keep it about them, not you. As you give your 5 Myths, take the position that you want them to make good decisions and this will help, regardless if they purchase from you or not.
2. Ask them about their experience. As you discuss each myth, verify how this relates to their industry background and experience. If they say that they already are aware of the myth, ask how they verify each of the participants in the process.
3. Commiserate. Wherever possible, show understanding as to why they have believed these myths in the past and then explain that it is an industry wide problem, most everyone has been snowed.

I call it a Magic Trick because of the magic it creates. When you show the prospect behind the curtain to the truth, their heads nod, their suspicions are confirmed and they have self-discovered what they believe will help them make better decisions. This translates into trust in you as a trusted adviser who showed them the truth. Like magic.

In my town, there is a billboard that says -

“Our tellers are actually better listeners”

and then shows the logo of the bank in the lower right hand corner of the ad.

Since when has banking become therapy? My bank has now replaced my best friend, co-worker, spouse and dog? I don’t need better listening tellers for about a hundred reasons, including:

• I don’t bank with tellers- I bank with bankers or ATMs and tellers are neither
• Only the lowest common transaction is given to the teller and I will favor speed and accuracy 5:1 over listening
• There is no brand equity to be garnered by the bank nor financial value to me for this elusive to describe quality

I bring this up because I spend a great deal of time with companies working on their messaging to their largest prospects.  All sorts of characteristics are thrown out as potentially the silver bullet differentiator – language like “market leader,” “proven experience,” “greatest value” and so on. It is so much fluff and hype, and yet it is offered up as the best way for a company to differentiate itself from its competitor.

Differentiation comes from the unique way in which your company understands and solves your prospect’s business problems. For big accounts, there are only three real business problems:

• Time
• Money
• Risk

The shift is in focusing on the way the prospect counts their money, their time and their risk. A word of caution- when we are talking about very big sales, money is not about price, time is not about service and risk is not about guarantees. Those are not answers to business problems, they are answers to commodity questions from your competition.

The second shift is that if we are not talking numbers, we are not talking to them. When we put in platitudes like, “Lowest cost of total ownership.” What does that mean? When we offer banalities such as “Highest commitment to service,” how is a prospect to get excited about that? We need to make claims that are valuable in a business issue sense to our prospects,  and to do that, our answers have to be measurable. Some examples:

“Companies hire our firm when they need to solve one or more of these business problems:

• Increase a division’s revenue by 8% or more in less than one quarter
• Reduce new customer defections by more than 10% in less than a year
• Accelerate new customer purchase persistence to 80%+ in their first month”

These answers are a formula that creates your business claim for the business solution you provide. This formula for creating these business claims is straight-forward:

FORMULA:

Prospect’s Business Issue + defined amount of improvement + timeframe

Simple.

A couple of guidelines -

1. Use claims based upon your past best clients. Indicate that these are the possible results, but that every account is unique. Your goal is to engage a dialogue that provides the information necessary to add precision to your claim.
2. Use language that is very specific to your industry so that your prospect understands that your value and your claim is designed for them.
3. Create a conversation, not a debate. Your goal is to reach a quick and shared understanding of whether the prospect has the problem that you solve and whether you provide a credible and significant solution. If you are challenged on the claim, ask the informing questions that allow you to tailor the claim to that particular prospect.

As a general rule, I avoid free-consulting. It sets a bad precedent. However, this bank is so clearly in need of help that I will offer some advice as a favor to all who pass their silly billboard. Here are my alternatives to what they are offering.

• 100% of those who qualify get loans in less than a week
• We make over half of the motorcyle loans in the area, want one?
• Give us your money, we’ll give you more back each month

Take your own shot at this last one.  I would love to hear some other alternatives.

I do magic tricks.

Sleight-of-hand-card-trick-illusionist-escape-artist magic tricks. For the purposes of commerce and being able to submit a client invoice that survives audit, we call it “Deal Coaching,” “Strategic Seat at the Table” and “Program Support,” but trust me, it’s magic.

This part of the job requires all of the creativity, risk-taking, strategy, experience and play-maker talent that I have, and I love it. I’m not alone- most of the sales leaders, regardless of title, love this part of the job the most.

As you might imagine, magic can be a bit elusive in description and challenging in implementation. It’s the right-brain counterpart to the left-brain management process. One of these is an Excel™ spreadsheet, and the other is finger painting on vodka.

As to description, there are three major categories for thinking about sales leaders magic and they include:

• Strategy – The big pieces- market, product, big-account sales, budget, key account management. These are all areas where experience, insight, instincts and that last piece of je ne c’est quoi come together.
• Coaching – Shaping the “how” and the “what” that will be executed in the strategy created. It shows up as tactics, however, which tactic to use when is where the value is.
• Troubleshooting – The ability to decide what to do when you are out of tricks in the bag and have to conjure answers from thin air.

They all require a deep understanding of people, what is possible with your own company and your prospect’s company. Of course there is also the sales leader’s own broad background from a hundred plus other sales experiences, winning and losing, to frame the ideas and answers in relevant examples.

Guidelines for Great Sales Leadership Magicians

1. Battles are won before they’re begun. The best sales leaders do their work in the planning phase of each step in a managed process. This means that the important sales calls and meetings are road-mapped and role-played well in advance. It means that the reactions are anticipated and a guideline has been established. What people, what information, what challenges and objections are all considered and determined before the meeting ever takes place. Great strategy is not done on the fly- and even though it may be methodical, it is no less magic.
2. Coaches are on the sidelines. I have worked with many Sales Leaders who have only one trick in their trick bag- “Take Me.” They themselves are the magic, which means that they can only see themselves as the solution to any particular challenge. Many times they are right, the best solution is for them to go. If they do, they’ll be amazing and the prospect will close. However, it develops nothing in the organization. Besides, the role of sales leadership is to develop others, not just do. The best Sales Leaders stay on the sidelines most of the time. For one Sales Leader I worked with, we set up a simple set of rules:
   • If an opportunity was <$100,000 in revenue, he could only provide insight when asked. He could not talk to the client by phone nor participate in meetings.
   • If an opportunity was between $100,000 and $250,000 in revenue, he could participate in client calls by phone, but not in sales calls.
   • If an opportunity was over $250,000 in revenue, he could participate in meetings.

   The point of this example is not prescriptive. It is, however, illustrative that if the organization’s sales people are going to develop and the company is going to grow, magic has to be sparingly used.

3. Show your work. No matter what magic it is that a Sales Leader has performed, a sales rep will try to imitate the same trick at another time in another place. For this reason, you need to explain your magic, why you did what you did this time and why it was the right thing to do this time but not every time.  If you don’t, they have a high potential of messing it up. You’re your lesson stick? Who knows- but you have a better chance of passing on the limitations of what you are doing by explaining it than you do by hoping that they guess correctly.
4. Do the same trick twice. Magicians will tell you to never do the same trick twice because it becomes easier to figure out with repetition. For that reason alone, do the same trick twice and more so that people figure out why you are picking the strategies, coaching their behaviors, and troubleshooting according to a model. You want them to get better because it makes them better and increases the quality of problems you get to do your magic on.
5. Cluster your best tricks. When I am working with sales teams and we develop a strategy or troubleshoot a problem, my immediate question is, “Who else has a client or prospect for whom this approach would be a fit right now?” Through leveraging up my efforts with other sales people’s issues, we get more impact and greater long-term traction.
6. When to do magic. In my past blog, “Great Sales Management Isn’t Pretty”, I wrote about following a sales meeting process. The process tells you what accounts require magic. It is my strong recommendation that you do not try to do magic in that meeting. Rather, schedule another time when you can bring the right people, information and mindset to the discussion. If you try to do magic in the moment during that meeting, you will muck it up. You will not have all of the information that you need, you may not have all of the people that you need and you will not have the right-brain mindset. This is a recipe that will produce less than magical results.

Sales management is about process, sales leadership is about application. As my dad taught me, if you do your process correctly you earn the right to do your magic.

When I was a kid, my dad would take each of the kids for one week each summer on the road with him as he was doing his sales trips. My dad was a territory sales rep in Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. We would ride with him, talk on the CB radio to find out where “smokies” were, (I have already dated myself in a rather sad way), keep track of his appointment book, pull samples for his meetings and so on. We’d get chocolate shakes for lunch and go see movies at the movie theaters in the little towns we’d stay in at night. More often than not, he’d take us in the appointment and get to watch him sell and work with customers. I learned an amazing amount. Like most things you learn when you are a kid, I didn’t have any appreciation for what I was learning until I was much older.

One of the things he taught me was that success in sales is 90% process and 10% magic. “If you work your process, you earn the right to do your magic.” I heard that a thousand times. Nutty thing to say then, now I understand he was brilliant. The point is even more valid when it comes to sales management. Sales management is about process. Process, when done correctly, is boring. The 90% of the time that a sales manager spends on process creates the opportunity for him or her to be magical the 10% when sales leadership is necessary. This week I want to talk about the 90% process, next week I’ll talk about the 10% magic.

How to Manage Sales People The first thing I want to say is that management and leadership in the role of sales are not the same thing. Different goals, different skills and different muscles.  For sales management, I believe you are working on the execution of a process. Think of it like manufacturing. There is a design and engineering phase and then there is a production phase. The production phase is about efficiency and quality control. Sales management is what happens in the production phase of sales. To successfully manage sales people during this production phase I recommend the following:

1. Drive to a Step Process - Just like manufacturing, when you go to production, you set up a series of linked processes. In each process there are requirements to be completed in one step before you can go to the next step. Sales management’s role is to ensure that we are following the process and that this execution is efficient and meets quality standards.
2. Only Focus on the Gaps - It is tempting to try to armchair quarterback every deal in a weekly meeting with sales people. Don’t. The sales management process should be pointing out gaps in either the information that is supposed to be gathered in a particular step of the sales process, the people who are engaged or how long that step is taking in comparison to your expectations. Focus on just those gaps. If there are no gaps, then the process is working. Focus on only those accounts with gaps.
3. Compliance and Coaching Are Different - Coaching to solve gaps is a different exercise than ensuring that the machine is working. If you are brainstorming a solution for handling a thorny prospect or a stuck deal, set a separate meeting time. Production discussions are about running the machine, period.
4. Own the Time - Have your sales people bring their calendar with them. Their calendar is not their own, it is yours. Working through the next week or month’s schedule is a part of the meeting. Where will they be next period, are they going the right places with your right expectations, are they visiting to visit or are they advancing the sales process along the steps? These are the questions that sales management must ask as a part of the regular meetings.

Running the Sales Management Machine

1. Meet with sales reps 1:1 - As a sales manager, you have to drive sales process compliance and efficiency rep by rep and account by account. I advocate a 30 minute meeting every week with each rep for whom you are responsible. Set it for the same time every week and run it the same way. I know, it’s not sexy, but it is enormously effective.
2. No group meetings for sales people - There is a self-delusion that sale managers have. This delusion is the belief that sales reps learn from each other as we go through a sales meeting and discuss accounts. The only person learning in a session like that is the one sales person who owns the account. In addition, he or she is usually evasive or defensive when put on the grill in front of his or her counterparts. Group meetings are for product and process education, recognition and market planning.
3. Thirty minute rule - All sales reps have ADHD, (unless they are the one talking), so don’t have long meetings. A simple rule is 30 minutes of prep for you per rep meeting and 30 minutes of meeting with each of them, done every week. If you have 5 reps, that’s 5 hours per week to run the machine. If you run the machine, the machine will run and get better, but it is boring. That’s OK. Run the machine the right way and you get to make more magic, which I’ll talk about next week.
4. Be consistent - If you want to train someone to think like you, ask them the same questions every time and they will soon anticipate your questions. This means that they will prepare to answer your questions and begin to ask those questions of themselves every time. Soon you will have people who think like you. If you play “gotcha” by asking all sorts of different questions, they will give up because they can’t get it right. By working to a process, you can develop your series of management questions. By asking those consistently, you will soon get a group of sales people who are following a consistent process. That’s an efficient machine.
5. Get commitments, take notes - By running this meeting every week, you should be able to implement rigor and impeccable follow-up, which is what is necessary for a good sales process. Take the notes of what is to be done each week by each person and start off the following week with where the person is on their commitments from the prior week. Sounds simple, right? This is one of the biggest mistakes we see- a lack of consistent rigor around commitments.

We have seen as much as a 40% lift in productivity of sales people over a less than 90 day window in the companies who have implemented just this set of practices.

It’s boring, isn’t it? That’s why so few sales managers do it- they want to do the magic and they forget the need for the rigor. You get to do your magic because you earned that right by following your process.

I was flying with a senior engineer from one of the top 5 aerospace companies in the world this week as he was on a trip to meet with a number of his suppliers around the country. He’s been an engineer on the supply chain management side for years in several different very large companies. I asked him his thoughts on smaller suppliers- how can they get into a big company, how can they grow their business and what are some of the common mistakes. A couple things I got from our conversation include:

Getting In The traditional answers came up, but some nuggets came out. Industry networking – figure out a way to connect to the senior people at trade shows. Read the papers and articles in the industry and contact those authors who are active engineers in the companies with whom you would like to do business. LinkedIn is an emerging way to reach out to senior people and he is seeing more social media connection going on, especially in the specialty groups that are formed inside of LinkedIn and other SM platforms.

Procurement He saw my eyes roll and he laughed, but he tried to reassure me that this is still a good way to get in. His point was that starting at the top and working on getting an executive sponsor in Procurement/Purchasing/SCM is still the right move. Most small companies look at these areas as processes to follow or areas to avoid. However, his point is that the executives in these areas get big points for bringing in good suppliers who solve problems. If there is a mix of smaller suppliers who make the grade, they get every bit as much credit as working with a big supplier. In addition, smaller suppliers are easier to move into the “Top Supplier of the Year” winner’s circle at the end of the year because they are easier to develop, which is another way those executives keep score. His point was that the executives in this area of the business are getting their heat from the company for failing suppliers of any size. If they can get a quick resolution to a real problem by bringing in a smaller but successful supplier, it is a big win.

Main Suppliers Being a second to a prime supplier is a successful route and often leads to the second becoming a prime over time. His emphasis was the “over time.” The route is second, co-developed parts, prime, and this cycle moves slowly.

Here’s what he said about growing your business: Small companies are often looking for the fast win and fast growth, so they push too early. By being painstakingly perfect on initial orders, the follow-on orders and projects will come more quickly. Go slow to move fast.

Also, he said that smaller companies who ask for help, collaborate and are transparent rocket to the top of the list. The ones who hide their issues, close down or try to solve everything themselves do not look like good partners- they look suspicious.

Visibility Is Big Bring more people to the meetings when the big company comes to your site. Use the visits not only as quality control and education sessions but do in-services, brainstorming, and problem-solving sessions. When you visit the big company, take more people. Take senior people, take the president, when the big company is in the offices regardless of the level of person who comes, the executives of the smaller company need to show up and spend time.

Also, who is directly working the account is a HUGE issue. Don’t use younger, inexperienced people in any way on the account. Senior people need to handle the account management, the regular touch point work, any engineering, production or logistics areas.  If the bigger company makes a comment about a person they like or dislike, take it very seriously. Those relationships are very impacting to the overall companies’ relationships in many ways behind the scenes.

I think for many of us who work in the small business to big business arena, these thoughts echo our own impressions and experience of how this works: a good reminder and all of that.

However, I found the conversation interesting because of some general tones that were worth noting:

1. Smaller is better: The general sense was that his experience was that he preferred smaller vendors because of responsiveness, leverage and quality. His big issues were resources and that he felt that as those companies grew they sometimes “forgot who brought them to the dance.”
2. Playing favorites: Once a smaller company became a “go to guy for me,” he would maneuver the system to favor that company very aggressively. However, that company had to be able to respond with the same energy, quality and success on the next project or they became pigeonholed and would not get many new opportunities.
3. Whining v. collaborating: His point was that he and his people would work tirelessly with a company that they liked, who demonstrated that they were working just as hard and who collaborated. They cut off the whiners – those companies who had no ideas, who waited for his group to make all of the revisions and who seemed to sit on the other end of the rope waiting to be pulled up instead of at least grabbing onto the rope and to start climbing.

For most everyone reading this I think you will feel as I did about this conversation, invigorated. It clarifies from behind the curtain what the market thinks about your efforts and how it will respond to your approach.

My street cred is just shot… A sampling of recent emails and Facebook posts to me include the following Farmville related comments….

• “Say it isn’t so…You’ve gone down the Farmville path?
• “King of Compost? I will remember that title! Congrats!”
• “You have just been awarded the white ribbon ‘Lord of the Plow’
• “Tom found a Lonely Bull on their farm, Oh no!”

How can I hold my head up as a true professional consultant with a busy schedule that neither clients nor prospects can get an appointment on for weeks if not months, and yet I apparently have this absolutely frivolous time-suck of a hobby?

If you have missed the Facebook driven craze of Farmville, let’s just say that it is Second Life™ for the next generation. In this digital second world, you own an imaginary farm that you work for the purpose of earning imaginary coins to buy imaginary things to put on your imaginary farm. You work with real friends and acquaintances on Facebook to help each other to build your farms. Most of the exchanges are imaginary exchanges of imaginary items to build your imaginary farm and do not require any real conversational exchanges at all. From what I can tell, this imaginary life consumes between 1/5th and ½ of your real life’s waking moments.

Why Farmville is Brilliant

• Hyper-viral – Every step you take in your progress is posted for your community and friends. They are very incentivized to watch because every step you take also means that you have free gifts you can digitally bestow on them and they can even request. Just by being friends, not even being Farmville junkies, you can be helpful. On top of this, your real friends BEG you to start a farm, “…not to get involved, but just so you can be my neighbor and send me things every once and awhile… PLEEEEEASE….I only need 3 more neighbors and I can get a compost heap!” This is how this phenomenon went from nowhere to 22,000,000 players in less than 18 months.
• Treatment resistant – The darn notices just keep rolling up. The emails and requests from lifetime friends and family members keep showing up. The comments at the beginning of this blog came from people who have never posted up a comment to me on Facebook ever- but they obviously read my Farmville posts and had to say something, (I think in the treatment world they call this an ‘intervention.’). My point is that simple friendly requests and even stonewalling the barrage of notices on your Facebook account will not stop the onslaught.
• Digital pellets – The immediate gratification and sense of community cannot be denied. When the farms in our house are growing, prospering and friends are sending materials so my family can build their next barn, everyone is happy. These digital pellets are free, but they bring much good karma with them.
• Addiction means money – Because of the popularity of Farmville, 7-11™ stores ran a promotion that would give customers digital codes to pick up unique “Farmville items” when they purchased particular items. The 7,000 7-11™ stores were unprepared- every item sold out and sold out about as fast as the iPad release. The heavily accented storeowner I spoke with told me, “We can’t keep this Farmville stuff in stock- I don’t know when the next shipment is coming. Do you want to buy a Slurpee?”

What’s to learn? The first answer is simple- 22 million people are crazy. Who would believe that this second world would be so obsessive? I can’t calculate the amount of lost productivity to the American economy, but it has to be in the billions. Is real life that uninteresting that we are drawn to plow, plant and harvest a digital farm for the purpose of gaining imaginary wealth and position in an imaginary farming community? Obviously yes.

Maybe the other lessons are more subtle. There are things to learn about community building, social media, frequency, rewarding behavior, and possibly something much larger about the current state of what we are as a culture. I don’t have those figured out, but I am open to anyone’s thoughts.

Full-Disclosure I am not a Farmville farmer, although I have a farm. My daughter Cate is the tenant-farmer of my farmer, and I am just the land owner. I outsourced management and farming responsibilities to her, recognizing that my time was better spent in other pursuits- Like running a real company, in a real world, helping to solve real problems for real money. So, if you get a notice from me that I have “Just discovered some fuel in my Farmville field” or have achieved a “Blue ribbon in goat milking,” know that those are the notices of success for my little girl Cate, and as a father, I just couldn’t be prouder than if she had milked the goat in the real world.

I just finished a 16-day trip to Asia with my son and it was probably one of the best experiences of my life.

I don’t often write about personal things in this blog- but so many of you were helpful when I asked for suggestions for this trip that I wanted to let you know how it went. However, I am not going to give you a travelogue of the trip- I just want to take a few minutes and tell you about what I learned in the process of planning and having this incredibly special trip with my son, a gift to him for his graduation from high school.

First, in full disclosure, the idea of doing this trip was taken from a great friend of mine, Eric Protzman. When each of his children graduated from high-school, he took them on a long trip to anywhere that they wanted to go. The deal was that it would be just the two of them, they had to help with the planning and it had to be someplace that they had not been before.

When I asked for some context from Eric, he laid it out this way:

“Tom, you will never have a chance to have this time with your child again. They won’t be able to take the time from school, commitments, spouses or children or careers to do a trip like this except at this very particular time in their lives- right after they graduate high-school. Also, it is the perfect time to re-write some of the rules of your relationship. They are probably 18, a legal adult and are making a huge transition from your house to college and a different life. This creates the opportunity to mark that transition and re-set your relationship. And, if you do it right, it will be a priceless experience for both of you.”

Believe it or not, this turned out to be an understatement.

Zach chose China at age 12- which is when I had heard about this from Eric and the first time I discussed it with Zach. He stuck with that location without change through graduation. Eric’s kids took different paths- one wanted the Beatles trip through all of their milestone spots in Great Britain, the other wanted a backpacking trip through Central America. The location is not necessarily important as long as it is new, challenging and away from here. I personally think off of the continent is great because it puts you and your graduate on more even footing and out of the easy norms of TV, cell-phone and internet habits.

I started saving for the trip then. Stored up my points from credit cards and frequent flyer programs, (gratefully, all of the airlines have basically merged, so all my points came together into one account. Who could have predicted that?), set money aside and Zach started saving money then as well with his own special account.

About a year ago we started planning, asking for ideas from readers like you and my personal network, got a travel agent and worked out an itinerary.

Those basic mechanics aside, here is what I want to tell you:

IT’S AMAZING!

We bonded. We talked about everything, saw everything, did all sorts of “firsts” together and created a shared library of experiences that are just ours to share forever. On top of that, we are not in the same place in our relationship as when we left. Is he a man now? I don’t know if I would go that far, (seems to lack things like a job, real responsibilities, a mortgage, the ability to grow a credible beard in two weeks even though he tried, and so on). But, we relate to each other differently already.

Some guidelines I want to pass along to you…

1. No lecturing or teaching allowed. I made a deal with myself that if we were going to have this trip it was a travel trip together, not a field trip for my ongoing development of him.
2. Do new stuff. Part of what made this trip memorable was the “firsts” we did together, including doing things that I would not normally do. We raced motorcycle taxis through Bangkok at rush hour, drank 120 proof Chinese liquor in Beijing, played blackjack in Macau and so on. I have pictures of 20 buddhas from temples in China, but I guarantee that the buddhas won’t be the stories we will tell at the family gatherings for years to come, it will be these and some others I can’t publish.
3. Traveling together. I did not set out rules for how we would travel together- too much dad v. kid in that. We just talked through how we would travel and what would make it work better. Simple stuff – he stays up late and gets up late- I’m the opposite. He sleeps with the TV on and has it on all of the time, I never do. I pack in an orderly fashion and ahead of time, he looks like he is jumping bail. We worked this out beforehand with one goal; making the trip better.
4. Planning. I took the majority of the responsibility for the logistics of the trip, but we worked through what was important to him in each location and what we could get done. Part of it was money management, part of it has to do with prior experience in travel and part of it was time.
5. Shut out the world. I am not kidding when I say that this is a once in a lifetime experience. If you get sucked into blackberry, email and voicemail back in the real world, you will be trading out something short-term for something priceless and permanent. We made calls home for 5 minutes at the end of the day, (morning here), each day and that was pretty much it.

I am the zealously converted now. The graduation trip is the most amazing thing that you can do with your child as you transition into a new phase in your lives and relationship.

Let me offer my great thanks to all of you who gave suggestions of “must-see” sights for our trip. We followed your recommendations closely and our trip was vastly better for it.

If you have children of any age under graduation age, I recommend that you plant the seed of the idea now, open the bank account and prepare for a graduation trip present.

No matter what else we’re talking about in seminars, workshops and coaching sessions, I’m always asked the same question: How do I deal with price resistance?

My answer is easy when price is the only issue. Present the buyer with the lowest price option and win the deal.

A lot of the time, however, price is not the only issue and it’s merely being used as a smoke screen. You are getting price pressure for a lot of the usual suspects that you already know—the buyer believes that they should push for lower price, uncreative people want more for less and so on.

I want to challenge you to think of price in a different way. If you are not offering a commodity, price is a byproduct of other issues. You must be clear on these issues with the prospect or client so you can get control of the price discussion.

• Price is relative to business problems. If you are selling in the iron-triangle of Service, Quality and Price, then you are not selling value that solves business problems. You are selling into a comparative matrix that boxes you into a same:same measurement with our competitors. When you solve business problems – Time, Money and Risk—then you are in a very different dialogue. An example of this comes from one of my clients. They sell programming services on a particular operating system. This typically means that they are being compared on a bid with other vendors by how many hours it takes to complete the job and what the hourly rate is. In other words, they are a commodity in that market.

  However, they changed the conversation by saying the following:

  “If you need this project completed in a year, anyone in our industry can do the work. If you need this completed in 6 months, we can give you a list of 5 firms that can do this work. If you need this completed in less than three months…we’re it.”

  By defining the business problem as a time problem, price became a smaller part of the discussion. The interesting thing is that for those companies for which time was not the major driver, my client was still able to win business at their price because an important value of time and ability to finish the project with confidence was elevated in the conversation. The issue for all of us is how we frame the business problem apart from price.

• Price is a reflection of confidence in outcome. If there were a 100% guarantee that there would be a resolution to a buyer’s business issue, then his or her willingness to pay that price could go up. When I get price resistance on my proposals, I ask this question, “If we could get you a $20 million increase in sales in one year, would it be worth a million dollar investment?” Their answer is almost always yes. Then I say, “Well, this discussion is not about price then. It is really about your confidence in the outcome of this proposal. So, let’s talk about what would give you greater confidence in this proposal and also let’s make certain that all of your concerns are on the table.” In responding to price resistance on large account sales, focus on the issues of confidence before you discuss price or terms.
• Price is a reflection of measurement context. In the world of business solutions, there is no such thing as a true “apples to apples” comparison. Complex solutions are almost never exactly the same in the solution architecture between two competing companies. That means that there is no valid comparison between you and your competitor in the area of price. I recently used the example that you would not ask a nurse to remove a tumor, or a neurosurgeon to cure a cold. On the spectrum of care, these represent the same industry, but different problems and different solutions. This happens to you as well. A lower quality provider in your market is held up as “just as good as your solution” by your prospect, so therefore the only point of comparison must be price, right? Only if you allow it to be.
• Never Haggle. The difference between negotiating and haggling is simple. Negotiating is when you are making adjustments in terms, conditions and scope of work between two parties. Haggling is when you are asked to do the same work as you have proposed, but for less money, period. I don’t believe in haggling. If your work is priced correctly, then any adjustment in price will require an appropriate adjustment in scope, terms or conditions.

In my experience, the price resistance comes when no better context has been established for the discussion. Establishing the right context for the evaluation of your proposal is 100% our responsibility. If you are getting price resistance and your offering is not a commodity, then the context needs to be adjusted.