By Tim Searcy

I have referenced before that the CIO for Nortel made a keen observation that “companies no longer buy from companies, they buy from supply chains.”  Supply chain management is a buzz word concept that has actually had some staying power.  More of our clients are finding themselves in presentations in which they have brought in “partners” to assist in selling to a whale. Multiple- team selling can be a way in which your company can combat the “whale’s” natural fear that your organization is too small.  As in all things, the devil is in the details.

There are some good reasons to sell with partners.  There may be a set of capabilities that required by the buyer that you are not able to deliver.  Additionally, sometimes a key relationship may exist between a potential partner of yours and the polar bear (economic buyer) inside the whale.  It could be that the partner you are working with brings the necessary local office and physical proximity that the whale demands.  Finally, whales will occasionally tell you that a specific partner would make your offering more appealing to the firm.  Regardless of the reason, if you have decided that you will take on partners to sell the whale-sized deal, you need to keep some things in mind:

1. Who owns the chain? A supply chain or a multiple partner solutions needs to have someone in charge.  If it is you, the strength of the chain link and your ability to manage the chain are paramount.  You do not want to be in a position that a partner can somehow go around the relationship that you have and secure the business without you.  Contracts must be in place to clearly specify that for this particular pitch, your partners cannot compete separately or with a competitive solution.  If you are the subordinate in the relationship, it is important that you only select the very best partner to hunt with.

2.    How do we control the pitch? Often times, powerful salespeople or forceful personalities can take over the strategy and pitch approach of a supply chain seeking big business.  If you are in the lead, control needs to be set for items like venue, agenda, speaking times, message that will be conveyed and stories that will be told.  You will also want twice the number of rehearsals that you would normally use because the players have not worked together, and a seamless presentation will be a key way to alleviate the whale’s fears.

3.    What is the brand we are pitching? When you are selling as a supply chain, figuring out your brand can be complicated.  Will the lead firm own the contract?  Who will handle collections?  For the prospect, the question becomes “who are all of you people anyway?”  For the very biggest deals, I recommend having business cards printed that have the prospect’s logo on the card along with the lead firm and a clear title for everyone as the client’s team member.   Remove the confusion about who you are collectively by focusing on the prospect as the point of connection.

If we have concerns about trying to sell into a whale as a team of teams, imagine how the prospect feels.  One of the important points we make at HBS is to never scare the whale.  When you come at the whale with multiple players representing multiple firms, you could easily scare the whale.  Here are the come things that may be on the whale’s mind that you need to address:

• “Why is there a chain to begin with?” It is very likely that the whale starts with a one stop shopping approach to establishing a new business relationship.  The natural bias may start with opposition to a collective of providers.  Reasons that may offset that concerns include that you have selected the best of breed in individual component provision, or that single sourcing does not make sense in this particular case or that specialty requirements that move the work from the mainstream demand a unique solution.
• “Am I paying for redundant overhead?” It will be no surprise that multiple firms implies multiple hand offs and higher costs.  It will be your responsibility to clearly lay out the economics of the multiple team approach and explain the financial advantage.
• “What if this all goes bad, but I like some of the links?” Although prospects don’t always communicate their interest in some of the individual partners, it happens frequently.  In very clear terms, you need to let the prospect know that you have come together as a team and will stay together as a team because that is what is in the client’s best interest.
• “Do these people know how to work together?” Or “Am I going to be first?” Few things scare whales more than transition costs related to communication or ignorance of the new provider of business practices, business needs, market conditions etc.  We scare whales when we give the impression that the necessary training to get up to speed will have to cross multiple companies and multiple cultures.  It is important to emphasize any historical pairings that have been successful with the teams you choose.  If this is not possible, the process of making the delivery painless to the customer and with single contact point account management should be used to convey simplicity and service delivery.

Supply chains are an effective way to deliver service.  Whales can appreciate the value of multiple smaller firms positioning themselves as a superior combined solution.  The key is to make the actual work look like one firm is performing it instead of a jigsaw puzzle of individual pieces.

By Tim Searcy

Nothing beats the real world for reminders about sales process challenges. During a recent seminar when I asked people to name members of the Buyer’s Table, a participant chimed in with, “The idiot who thinks he knows everything and for some reason, everyone in the client company listens to him.” Of course, when we push down on this type of person just a little bit, we realize that they are the smartest kid in the remedial class. The rest of the firm turns to the only light of information they have and trust . . . one of their own. As the smartest person the client knows on the topic in question, they are trusted implicitly and completely. For this reason, the one-eyed man in the land of the blind really is king, and we better know what to do about him. We can:

1. Eliminate the expert from consideration. This almost never works unless your champion has always suspected that the expert was not that knowledgeable. Be very careful. An expert enjoys protected class status, and the attempt to eliminate them by showing them up can have consequences. The expert is on site or in the firm, and has relationships both professional and personal. The “nobody picks on my sister but me” mentality can take over and you will be shut out.

2. Ignore the expert. Sometimes this is wisest. Until you know the lay of the land, simply treat the expert as another member of the buyer’s table. Their questions and comment have equal merit and weight as everyone else, BUT NO MORE than anyone else. This play works well if you can keep the expert looking informed but not smart. It is advantageous to agree that the expert from their team in knowledgeable, but that the expertise exists in your team.

3. You can marginalize the expert. This involves creating clear boundaries for where the expert’s knowledge ends. In this way, the individual can feel validated about their knowledge and can even receive compliments from you while at the same time, their potential impact on the overall process can be minimize.

4. Engage the expert. This solution is fraught with peril. To engage the expert is to let their opinion dominate the dialog. Unless the expert is your firm advocate AND clearly has the ear of the polar bear, this individual can become dictatorial from your endorsement of their knowledge. If you choose to engage the expert, you must educate them from their current point of information until they actually do achieve expert status. In this way, you solidify their power base and at the same time make yourself indispensable to their future role.

5. Convert the expert. This strategy is for the expert that has clearly chosen a different solution or has “seen it all”, and just knows that your solution is not going to be effective. Instead of coercion or conversion, it is best to attempt collaboration. In this scenario, bring the expert closer, and ask lots of questions. Provide no statements or rebuttals until all of the thoughts are out on the table. Use questions to encourage the expert to move to your way of thinking.

The experts often rely on their role as expert. They are not easily replaced or eliminated, and although their true knowledge of the subject matter may be limited, their knowledge of the organization is greater than yours. Craft a strategy that puts the expert inside your circle managing the decision making process with you instead of outside your circle directing the process towards you.

By Tim Searcy

Ahh meetings—those wonderful illusions of productivity, collaboration and focus.  Meetings are the standard reaction to sales management crisis just as running an IV is the standard answer in an emergency room.

OK, you are going to have a meeting because you are in a crisis. What are you going to meet about?

Enthusiastic yelling, leading and hours of meetings will only create the illusion of problem solving.  Instead, you need information.  There are three types of information you have to get a stranglehold on right away in a sales crisis: pipeline, prospects and potential.

1. Pipeline. The pipeline is defined as the list of real opportunities for which you have credible, verifiable information including all of the following:

• Dollars. How big is this, how soon can we see it, and how long will the opportunity continue to pay us and is there a bigger payout later?  But even more important than that is the rock solid assurance that a trigger event has occurred that will make certain this deal happens, and an unshakeable knowledge that a budget of sufficient size has been allocated to do the work. Without these, the dollars are dreams, not dollars.
• Dates. When the deal is going to close is less relevant than when it will bill.  More importantly, what control do we have on moving the dates forward versus waiting for things to happen?  Sometimes a prospect will make accommodation or we can directly impact how quickly actions can take place by what we do.
• Decision Making. You have to know the criteria upon which the awarding of the work will pivot.  If we don’t know how the fears that the deal will alleviate in the client’s mind, we don’t know enough to win.
• Decision Makers. Is the economic buyer involved and have we personally engaged with them yet?   What do we know about these people as individuals, and what research do we have on them and their history in decision making?  Again, do we know what has triggered the choice to change providers or move outside?

The goal of the pipeline information analysis is to trim down the pipeline to a 30-60 day action cycle. Clean out everything that does not provide the information you need, set it aside for reconnaissance work and now focus on the remaining pipeline over which planning and energy can have impact.

2. Prospects. What if your remaining pipeline is ‘thin’? The crisis may not be able to be addressed with the opportunities in the pipeline even if we close at a slightly higher rate than we have in the past.  We have to look above the pipeline to find out where we can hope to see more opportunities.

• Source. Often a crisis is at least in part about our own expenses. As a sales leader, you will be asked to address things like trade shows, advertising, sponsorships, client gifts and T &E.  You need to have a great sense of where your best leads are coming from.  In a crisis, there is nothing you have to do.
• Rate of flow. What is the pace of demand generation and does it have seasonality?  Trade show season is often touted as the best time to get new leads.  However, every marketing activity has a lifecycle, and someone needs to work through a calendar to give you an expected number of leads for each cycle.  Then you need to determine if the lead flow will be sufficient, and if not, what expense trade offs are you willing to make to gain a greater or different yield of leads.
• Distribution. This is no time to play fair.  If you have been using a standard distribution of leads to sales people, you need to rethink this.  In a time of crisis, you need your best people chasing the best opportunities.  Crisis by its nature means you will have to sacrifice something, and unfortunately the feelings of your less productive salespeople may need to be ignored.

These steps are all valid if the pipeline is too small to overcome the gap that is creating the crisis. If you have a big enough pipeline, however, WORK THE PIPELINE and leave the fresh prospecting efforts until you have exhausted the pipeline.

3.    Potential from current clients. Often the place we go first is our current clients.  We know them, and they know us, and it is likely that we are not getting all the business from them that we should.

• Current status. With which clients are we currently in good standing?  This is not the time to chase someone who is angry at us to ask for more business.  As a sales leader, it will require nerves of steel to face down an owner or boss and say “No, it is not time to ask for more business from this client, because they are already on the edge of firing us.”  I have seen many organizations in which the CEO is completely unaware of the current relationship challenges and the severity of those challenges.
• State of Triggers. It is very difficult to pull a trigger that is not there.  We have to assess whether we have a good story other than our need for why we should be getting more business from a current client.  If the client does not have their own rationale for giving you more, you will need to take one with you.  Ask yourself, “What problem do I solve for my client or fear do I alleviate for them when they give me more business?”  Conversely, you need to assess what problems or fears you create when they give you more business.

With this information, you can begin to make the most important decision any leader can make: what not to focus on.  That’s right, this is a reductive process.  Get rid of the lower impact items and drive the things you can manage like a ten penny nail (That means really, really hard!)  Many times, the answers you get from your investigation will drop that pit in your stomach to depths you had not realized existed.  However, from real truth comes real change.  You need to design a plan that takes into account Pareto’s law, and focus on the 20% that can give you the 80% you have to have to get out of the crisis.

By Tim Searcy

“. . . but nobody wants to die.” Or, so the saying goes. This is so true for all management change. I’ve been spending time with CEO’s that are frustrated with their teams. Although everyone wants to see better outcomes, the sales leadership has been unwilling to adopt behavior change. The fact is that if a company keeps using the same tools, thinking and approach, it will get the same outcome. Change requires in a word, well, change.

If you’re implementing Hunt Big Sales’ methodologies, or the concepts originally put forth in Tom Searcy’s book Whale Hunting, and are frustrated with the pace of internal adoption, consider the following three questions:

1. Have you been crystal clear about your unwavering commitment to the new sales process? Change of this nature is not collaborative throughout the organization, nor does the decision require “buy in.” This is a radically different approach to change management, but simply assuming that you’ll be able to get everyone on board diminishes the elements needed to enact revolutionary change. The only group-think that has to be done is at the very top of the organization, and that is the firm’s commitment to begin. Now, the second step of implementation requires tremendous discussion and explanation. This is about helping people understand, “why?” In tough times like the current recession, it is possible that the reason is as simple as survival.

2. Do you have a step-by-step time line for implementation? In my client experience, it is wise to understand that everything cannot all happen at once. Take for example something simple in nature, but complicated in acceptance: the movement pipeline. Many companies attempt to put in place the movement pipeline in one afternoon. This approach is doomed to confusion and frustration. Instead, follow this order of introduction as an example for all aspects of the HBS system:

• Define your terms: Without a clear understanding of what words mean (in writing), too much interpretation will take place and misalignment is assured.
• Lay out the process: In the case of the movement pipeline, this means making certain that everyone understands what each step means, followed by agreement on the order of steps, and the policies if an account moves outside the process.
• Test the system: Take five or ten of your last accounts and put them in the pipeline report to see if reality matches design. If not, then change the design properly, or examine if reality has actually been the problem.
• Implement on a beta basis: The movement pipeline dictates strong accountability in both the positive and negative for failure to accomplish 10 movements per week, or to eliminate wasted accounts. For this reason, try out the system for 60-90 days prior to placing it into stone.
• Implement the system and review semi-annually: So often organizations get started on a process and then spend tremendous amounts of time tinkering with the process without allowing the system to just work. Let the process run for awhile before making changes, and resist the urge to modify on the fly when something does not feel right for a specific account.

3. Are you following the “prescription?” Medication does not work if you do not take it in the dosage prescribed or at the intervals directed by the physician

These questions should lead to the truisms of change excellence. In short, you have to mandate change as its most passionate agent, engage a plan that has clear milestones for assessment of delivery, and work the plan as it is prescribed by Hunt Big Sales.

And, obviously, if you need help in these three areas, just give us a call so we can talk about where you’re stuck. We love this stuff, and are happy to help.

(Start a dialog by calling or emailing Carajane Moore: 317-847-8037 or carajane@huntbigsales.com.)

By Tim Searcy

In the last month, I’ve visited with 75 CEOs, and there is a universal understanding of undeniable truth: things are tough out there.  Now although this is obvious, the varied responses haven’t been so obvious. 

Most reactions have come in three forms:
 
1. Self-denial – “Everyone else is having a tough time, but we prepared for this in advance. If we make a few cuts, I think we’ll ride this out just fine.”

2.  Panic – “We’ve pulled back on all spending, and we’re going to wait for the market to turnaround.”

[Note: I have not found one person that can tell me what the trigger point will be so that they or any of us will be certain that the turnaround has arrived.]

3. Change – “We see this as an opportunity to re-evaluate all the initiatives that we engaged in during the strong market to determine what was worthwhile, and what was truly an unsuccessful gamble.”

Big Sales-minded organizations are thinking like the third guy quoted… 

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Guest post by Tim Searcy

When I grew up, social networking was code for cocktails at 5:30 PM. Now I find out that it’s code for just about anything and everything digital that brings disparate individuals and groups together: blog postings, topic-based forums and many other platforms I’m just now getting my head wrapped around.

My friend and colleague Azlin Happley sent the old timers in the office some clear rules of engagement for Social Networking, and I thought it would be nice to let you weigh in as well. She is classified into whatever the sociologists call the most recent generation, and I trust her knowledge of the technology that makes me go “WOW!”

Social networking is often about reading a lot of postings, and carefully selecting the person that you want to engage in conversation. However, instead of the blast nature of some other forms of marketing, you have to be very one-on-one when the promise is a one-to-one relationship. This means you will have to e-mail the person you want to connect with, and this is where it can get hairy…

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By Tim Searcy

I’m sick and tired of fruit analogies. In particular when I hear, “We want to make an apples to apples comparison.” GRRRRRR!!!!!!! Sometimes we spend so much time distinguishing ourselves from our competition’s efforts in order to commoditize ourselves that we forget that there are commonalities in our competitive product set. If a commodity is defined as, “when two things are being viewed as good enough,” there are times this characterization can work in our favor. In legal parlance, it is called “conceding the point.”

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