Strategy is often directly influenced by whom the enemy is.

Pricing is influenced, of course. Also, your approach to the deal is impacted, as well as whether you even continue the pursuit.

However, because of governance rules, procurement guidelines and the jerk-nature of some smug buyers it is getting harder and harder to know who your competitors are.

I was recently sent an email on this very topic just last week, and here is what I told him:

Thanks for your email- It’s really hard to get a list of competitors from prospects – often times because of governance requirements in their process. However, you can triangulate sometimes using these questions (that your prospects may still not answer, but you have a better shot with these than without them):

* How did you generate the list of candidates for this project/contract?

* What were the top 3-5 characteristics that you used to qualify the list?

* Have you worked in the past with any of the companies you are considering? Are you working with any of them now?

These questions, if answered, give you a lot of insight, not just into the competitors, but to the buyers as well.

Let me know your best ideas by posting up here so everyone can share the best practices.

Why is it that the least important person in a presentation can hijack the entire meeting? You have been in these sessions when you are in full presentation and a person in the meeting starts the “challenging question” interrogation. It can sound like this-

• “Don’t you think that your approach costs too much for a company our size?”
• “How do you expect to integrate with our proprietary system if you have never worked with it before?”
• “What real and direct background do you have working in our industry?”

You’ve heard your own examples, I’m sure.  Regardless of the challenge, it often comes in the form of a challenging question, it happens before you have had a chance to complete your presentation and it could de-rail the entire conversation. These are pivotal points and if you handle them the wrong way you can burn through precious minutes in your allotted time, look defensive and weakened in the presentation or get trapped into elevating a trivial point into a major issue.

Here are a few strategies to deal with this:

1. Defer – The easiest one is to defer answering the challenge until the end of the presentation by saying, “That’s a good question, I believe we address some of what you are asking in the balance of this presentation. I’ll make certain to circle back with you at the end of the presentation to make certain we address anything left unanswered.”
2. Isolate – If you have a persistent provocateur, I encourage a different approach. Isolate this person and this issue by saying, “This seems like this issue is big enough for its own conversation. I want to honor your concerns and provide a more detailed answer than our time allows today. Let’s agree to set a meeting for you and any one else who is interested from this group and I’ll make certain we have a thorough discussion of that point.”
3. Recruit – Look to your executive sponsor for the meeting and say out loud, “This seems like an issue that needs addressing but is outside of the scope of this meeting’s purpose, if it is alright, I would like to table this issue for this meeting and return to it another time.” You are looking to your sponsor to confirm a shared understanding of the meeting’s purpose and support in closing this direction of discussion down for the time being.

Most of the time, these approaches will be enough to close out the issue for the time being. Often times, that same person will be unwilling to then meet afterwards. That’s Ok. Send out an email to the group who was in the meeting that says, “Please find attached an answer to John’s question from our meeting. We are working to schedule a follow-up meeting if necessary and will circulate notes from that meeting if appropriate.”

Often times the behavior of someone like the monopolizer is not unique to your meeting. He or she acts like this during internal meetings as well. You can tell because as they interrupt your presentation you can see the eye-rolls, setting down of the pencils or the focused doodling of the people in the room.

By managing that person, you not only keep the meeting on track, you sometimes win some new supporters and friends in the meeting.

*****

There’s still time to register for the Chicago kickoff of “Big Sale Factory: Level One Training” on May 24 & 25. It’s the start of a nine-week program designed to turn your company into an organization that regularly lands sales ten to twenty times your average. During the course of the program, you’ll develop:

• A business acceptance process that eliminates wasted efforts.
• A compelling corporate message designed to secure executive sponsorship.
• Insight on reading the minds of large account decision makers and how to make that work for you.
• A dashboard and management tools for directing and controlling every aspect of the sale.
• Techniques for creating the best possible team for each sales opportunity.
• Management plans for removing inefficiencies and accelerating performances.

For more information or to register for any of the upcoming dates, visit www.huntbigsales.com/workshops.php.

I have spent a lot of time this week preparing for a speech in Tucson next week. I am speaking at the NSGA (National Sporting Goods Association) annual convention. My audience is made up of owners of sporting goods dealers selling to teams/schools/school districts as well as manufacturers. I’m in a tough spot…I immediately precede Erin Andrews as the Celebrity keynote speaker for lunch. There may be a stampede at the end of my speech to get good seats…(I think it is bad form for me to lead the stampede, but I am an Erin Andrews fan and I may look for a back exit to get there first…I’m just sayin’).

The core idea of the speech is Relationship Selling vs. Organizationship Selling.

Relationship selling is about one-to-one selling. Very risky. In the buying world of today, everything is in flux, including:

• Buying processes
• Personnel
• Competitors
• Pricing
• Technology

Developing just one relationship in a company or organization is a bad strategy because too many things are moving beyond that one person’s control. Organizationship selling means changing the key relationship dynamic from one-to-one to either one-to-many or even better, many-to-many.

Specifically, for my audience this coming week, as a manufacturer’s representative, a dealer or distributor, your number highest value is found in the dimensions of service, which include:

• Accuracy – Orders are right, on time, delivered correctly.
• Availability – What the customer wants they get.
• Accessibility – Customer can reach her rep when she needs too.
• Choice – Customer has options of brand, color, product and so on.
• Responsiveness – When there are bumps, we jump and fix, fast and friendly.
• Price – We are market competitive and value relevant.

The real risk of your number one value being service is this:

When you win on service, you win one service experience at a time, one person at a time.

Too often this value is experienced by just your direct buyer, because the sales model is “relationship selling.” For the other members of the buying organization, service is a negative performance value. As long as nothing goes wrong, they don’t value the experience. Which means there is little connection to the service you are providing.

For the companies who are in this predicament, they have to move the service experience from a person to a community of influence- an organization of all the recipients of the value. Here’s how:

Build an Organization picture – Who are all of the connected influencers to the Decision-Maker? One of the easiest tools for doing this is asking. OK- maybe too easy. How about mapping your contacts through LinkedIn to their contacts in their organization? In the area of sporting goods sales people, that community of influence goes well past the school or club. The fans, boosters, players and community sponsors all fit in that picture.

Implement the 5 C’s of Service Experience –

1. Create the Service Experience – Your company is hopefully already doing this at a world-class level since it is your number one value to your customers and prospects. This means touchpoint by touchpoint evaluation of the experience and making certain that it represents best-in-class service. Zappos creates this for its customers and
2. Capture the Service Experience – World class service becomes legendary because the story is captured and retold. You need to capture the service experience in story format so that it can be posted, emailed, published, videotaped and communicated to your clients and prospects. Think Zappos and Neiman-Marcus. Legends are not legends because of service alone…they are legends because their service is captured in stories that are re-told.
3. Get Credit for the Service Experience – Apply for the awards, get the stories re-told in the papers, publish them on your website and videotape the testimonials. You must take credit for what is phenomenal and then get credit in the marketplace. Testimonials include pictures of your customers and their service experiences. The critical piece is that you are getting the credit.
4. Communicate – Through your market touchpoints you need to tell your story to every one who is listening. This needs to pop up when they come to your website, go out in your digital newsletter, be a part of the inserts into your boxes and go to your customers. The service experience communication is a constant drum beat that pushes out the remarkable difference of your company to the market.
5. Cash in – Invite current customers to expand their service experience and new customers to receive the service experience. This is promotion work plain and simple. With every capture/credit/communicate cycle there needs to be a call to action for the market. If you are the true world-class provider of the service experience in your industry, customers will be grateful to find you.

The world of the dealer/distributor/MFR is under attack. The service experience is the last defense. It can be a great offense if you execute a 5 C’s program to get the value message to the larger communities of influence.

***

In the next few weeks, I’ll be kicking off  my Big Sale Factory Level One Training in Chicago, St. Louis and London. It’s a program designed to change the way your company handles sales, creating the following benefits:

• A business acceptance process that eliminates wasted efforts.
• A compelling corporate message designed to secure executive sponsorship.
• Insight on reading the minds of large account decision makers and how to make that work for you.
• A dashboard and management tools for directing and controlling every aspect of the sale.
• Techniques for creating the best possible team for each sales opportunity.
• Management plans for removing inefficiencies and accelerating performances.

If you’d like more information on the program, please check out the landing page over at www.huntbigsales.com/workshops.php.

In the 90’s and early 00’s Silicon Valley had convinced the world that IT should run the show. Remember how hard we worked to get a foosball table into the tech guy’s areas? Bean bag chairs in front of the big TV to play their video games? Special coffee makers? Because if we did not become the workplace of choice, well then we might not get the tech talent that we needed to be competitive…

Ah, how the mighty have fallen…or at least slipped.

With deep corporate cost cutting measures, the promised cost efficiencies of cloud-computing and aggressive off-shoring of tech jobs, IT is feeling a little less hitch in their giddy’up. I’m not preaching a comeuppance to anyone- these things all move in cycles and IT is in THAT cycle right now. What I think is important to understand is the context of how technology people are making decisions now. Make no mistake, IT drives many of the decisions, especially the NO decisions inside of companies. That means you need to know how to sell ideas to them in the current cycle.

Some guidelines…

• Why your “value proposition” pisses them off – The world of consumer technology is now the context for evaluating all technology. iPhone Apps, microwaves and cars that parallel park themselves have created the false impression that everything technology should now be “just add water and cook for 30 seconds” easy. It should also be free or darn cheap. If your approach is too expensive or complex, it will be impossible to get through their own company’s process. If it is too easy or cheap, the technology professional believes it won’t work…but he might be forced to buy it by the CXOs anyway and then get blamed later.
• They’re paranoid for a reason – On balance sheets and budgets IT is a big number. When its time to make cuts, you look at the big numbers first. Most companies selling technology solutions have in their arsenal some element of outsourcing. For the technology buyer, this means losing control of budget, headcount and power. No matter what solution you are selling, tech buyers have a sneaking suspicion it is a Trojan Horse of some kind.
• Know their bias – All technology people have bias. It comes from past familiarity. It could be platform based, operating system based, equipment based. There is a long list of comparative choices… and your buyers have defined their preferences. Do not listen when the words “It doesn’t really matter to me what solution approach you take as long as it works…” come out of their mouth. It matters a lot and the decisions will be influenced by their bias. Figure out their biases.

Strategies for presenting your ideas to technology buyers…

• No Stranded costs – You are not the first big purchase that they have made. Your solution needs to have some consideration for the last purchases and how much political capital that the buyer had to use to get the last system approved, especially if it was in the last 3 years. Otherwise, you are making your buyer look foolish in the previous purchase and he or she will work against you.
• Map their turf – People = Power. How will you be changing the scope of the organizational chart with your proposal? Can you show the turf as bigger even if the headcount is smaller? If your approach includes your staff in your company supporting them, show them on their command and control chart even though they are under your management and payroll.  They keep the turf, you get the business. You have to give consideration to the turf.
• Control – IT professionals are used to getting silence for success and a $#!T storm for failure. Your proposals have to give clear definitions of controls on security, project approvals, system changes and so on.  They have legitimate fears that your promised benefits will happen and you will get the credit for those wins, but any mistake is on them.

IT buyers have gotten very cautious. The world of technology is changing at such a rate that it is hard for them to keep up. Every decision made today can look foolish as soon as 6 months from now when a leap-frogging solution comes on the market that is better, faster, cheaper. Your job in selling to tech people is to know their context and help them feel safe, even though they can’t see around the corners of the future.

It is tough to be in marketing these days. CMOs have the life expectancy in their position of less than 19 months….and that’s dropping. Most of them have their LinkedIn™ profile permanently up on their laptop and are updating it hourly in the hopes a headhunter will spot it. It’s not just CMOs because with every regime change, the rest of their team goes into job-security roulette, waiting to see whether the ball lands on black or red- keep your job or lose it.

How do you sell to marketing organizations if there is this constant personnel rotation and job risk? Here are some recommendations:

1. Know the person’s history – Most people in marketing speak of their resume in campaign or brand successes rather than organizations or positions. They cite the program, product or new launch for which they can take credit and will do so early and often in your conversations. Do your homework, research the profiles of the marketing professionals you are meeting, reference their successes as they relate to the work you are proposing.

2. Talk the language of their discipline – Marketing is a big umbrella. Digital, direct, advertising, promotions, PR and so on, there are a lot of disciplines. Each discipline comes with its own language. Know what the measurement language is for success for each discipline and use it in your presentations, conversations and proposals. Marketers translate new approaches and technologies in their minds back into the languages of their past successes. Do the translation for them and you will be more successful.

3. Results have to be fast, measurable and safe – “You are only as good as your last marketing cycle” is the catch-phrase for marketers. You need to sell ideas that will generate quick and measurable results and for which you have already considered ways to increase their success potential. The biggest promise will not win the day with experienced marketer- the promise that has the greatest assured success will.

4. Show a testing path that will build confidence and budget – “There is always money for things that work.” It is practically a mantra when talking to marketing people about budget. They are right. However, you need speed to start if you want speed to money. Increase the speed to start by showing a testing path that is fast and accurate for any ideas that you are presenting. Remember, the clock is working against you, so start that path as fast as possible.

5. Keep their number – Make certain that you are tracking your marketers more closely than your fantasy football league, because the performance and the player movements are just as frequent. These people will update their LinkedIn™ profile on average 2 -4 weeks before they are departing their current role. If you get good and watching your connections, you will know your prospect list for months in advance as you follow your favorites from job to job.

Professional marketers are under ridiculous pressure to produce results. If you can be a clear provider of predictable results you will do business with them and their companies for all of their careers.

“He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.”

- Muad’Dib as quoted in Frank Herbert’s book, Dune

In the 90’s, geeks owned the world. The rise of the uber-nerd was embodied in the power given to all things tech. CIOs and CTOs were included in most high-level decisions and rightfully so- with the installation of enterprise management platforms like ERP, SCM and CRM systems, the point of constraint was with technology. In addition, the promised performance for reducing waste, managing Six-Sigma initiatives, just-in-time inventory models and so on all hinged upon IT people. They were absolutely the most powerful people at the decision-maker’s table.

Things have changed.

It’s now the time of the bean-counters. The finance people have all of the purchase power. To think otherwise is to deny the simple fact that the power to say “no” trumps the power to say “yes.” In the modern complex sale, “no” always wins over “yes” at the final hour of decision-making. The biggest, most powerful “no” out there today comes from the CFO.

An interesting point of reference: Boards of Directors hire 2 people who both report to the Board, the CEO and the CFO. Everyone else in the publicly traded companies reports to one of these two people. The CFO no longer typically reports to the CEO.

For this reason, I advocate starting all large account sales hunts with the strategy for landing the CFO. It does not matter if that is your first point of contact or your last, he or she is the only decision-maker when it comes to signing the deal who will matter. Every other person involved in the process is a preamble.

The language of CFOs is relatively simple. They talk money and safety. When it is time to sell to the CFO, how are you selling money and how much confidence are you giving the CFO that the money will actually show up?  What to talk about is simple. Let’s talk about some of the guidelines of how to talk about it-

Guidelines –

1. You are in court – Just the facts, no hearsay, conjecture or editorializing. If you can’t prove it, consider not bringing it to the conversation or including it in the email.
2. Never represent yourself – Bring your money person with you. Money people speak their own language and what trust they give they are more likely to give to another money person.
3. Make it safe before you make it interesting – The finance people are more concerned with the downside than they are with the upside. What can go wrong, in what ways can results be delayed, are there things that will increase costs and so on are all issues foremost in their minds.
4. Timeline the results and expenses – It’s not just about the totals. How the money moves in the cash flows, the quarterly performance projections and other considerations are important. A CFO once told me, “I’m not worried about what you’re doing as much as I am worried about where it’s going to show up.”  I swear a chill went down my spine when he said it. I understood at that moment that these guys aren’t counting the beans, they’re playing Mancala with them.
5. Have your supporters in the wings – Most of your supporters are hoping that you will win over the finance person, because if they could have they would have. They’ll support you and encourage the finance person to agree to the purchase if it looks like you are winning. You need to keep encouraging those supporters to feed information and support to the finance person through the process.

Old school thinking was that the finance person came last in the sales process and he could be strong-armed by the business unit leaders. Not so anymore. You might as well build your case for the finance person up front, because he or she has all of the decision power.

The top 5 stories will receive full profiles in my future blogs – including deal details, company highlights and podcast interviews with the winners.

Here’s what I need you to do:

Post up, right here and now, your biggest deal profile from 2010. This is your chance to shine, so don’t be shy. Answer a few key pieces:

1. What made the sale big?
2. What did you do differently?
3. What one tip would give someone else to land a big sale like you did?

I want to get this bragging opportunity to at least 1,000 people, so post this link into LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and anywhere else you interact with people who are part of this community of hunters: http://tinyurl.com/beststoriesof2010

I want to get 200 comments from coast to coast. I can’t do this without you so post your comment below right now.

Do this fast- We’re already into 2011 and I want to make certain that we get your glory now so you can take the lessons from the stories for your next biggest deal.

Let the bragging begin!

Sitting in a preparation meeting for a big presentation often feels like the focus is on the black dot instead of on the whiteboard.

The whiteboard in the pitch is not us, not our PowerPoint, not our samples or demonstrations. That’s black dot. The whiteboard is the audience- all the focus needs to be on the whiteboard. What I teach companies in their presentations to an audience includes the following:

1. Breakdown the audience - I hear too often when I ask about the key meeting, “Who’s coming from their side?” The answer “Our champion, and the technical person we have been talking too and 2-3 other people.” You need to know who is coming, name/title/role/length of service. You can’t prepare adequately for the presentation if you are preparing for the company rather than preparing for the people, one by one.
2. Pick 1 point per person - Each person who is coming will remember only one, (maybe two…but no more), points that you make. If you just present and don’t design the point you are making for each of the people individually, you are hoping that they “get it.” Focus on the point and then deliver it to that person in the meeting.
3. Pull through the threads - In previous phone calls, emails and meetings there has been a lot of communication. As you are presenting, pull through the language and points that your prospect has made along the way. Include language like, “In our last meeting John, one of your key issues was redundancy and that is why we are emphasizing our unique approach to that issue in this presentation today.” Hit those points hard and pull through previous communication into the meeting specifically.
4. Name names - Companies don’t buy from companies, people buy from people. As in the example above, I use the person’s name specifically in as many points as I possibly can. I want the presentation to feel tailored as well as register with the prospects that we have listened to them and this has informed our approach.
5. Build your presentation for a conversation - Simple rule: No more than 2 slides in a row without interaction. Your presentation, whether you use a presentation tool like Keynote(tm) or PowerPoint(tm) or not, needs to include intentional interaction as often as possible to keep your team connected to the audience and draw out the secondary issues to be  addressed.
6. Do your Murder Board - In one of my earlier blogs I talked about preparing for a presentation using a Murder Board approach. This approach means focusing on all of the questions you are afraid they might ask and then getting your answers down cold just in case they do. This is a “must do” for every preparation activity.

The big shift in all of this is, being in the heads of your audience, not in your head. “Change your point of view, you change your success.”

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.