Enterprise Sales Success: What You Actually Do

This lecture introduces you to the Personal section of the House of Sales. This is one of the foundational elements of sales - looking after yourself so that you can always perform at your best and some of the basic skills every sales person needs to succeed.

I give you an overview to the subjects in the rest of the lectures in this section, which talk about the following:

• You will get permission to focus on yourself because you are your own greatest asset.

• You will get tools for resilience so that you can keep going when it gets tough.

• I will show you the law of liking so that you can connect to people and have real conversations.

• You will be able to say no to people and problems that steal your time and keep you away from selling.

• You will be able to listen to customers so that they know you mean business.

• And finally you will be able to identify and build the networks you need and use influence to do business and support your career.

There is a full set of the tools and diagrams used in the whole section included as a download.

The importance of looking after yourself on a physical level. Business to business selling is a marathon, not a sprint, so looking after your health and the image you project out to the world is vital.

Creating a pitch and absorbing the relevant facts about your customers, you marketplace and even your own company is all the easier if you know how you learn. I cover a couple of useful ways of understanding yourself a bit better when it comes to taking information in and processing it.

When do you do your best work? By understanding your own rhythms for peak performance and rest, you can maximise your time and energy to give yourself the best chance at success.

Understanding your values and red lines also prevents you pursuing the wrong goals.

We cover both these topics so that you understand yourself better.

B2B sales is a team game, everyone has their part to play, from subject matter experts to the marketing people who create and maintain your brand. If you want to be successful then you have to be professional. There is an important distinction between professionals and players - the ones who are all noise and take up the resources of the support teams.

We all have 168 hours a week, the reason we don't all achieve the same amount with them is down to the fact that not all hours are equal. It is more useful to consider your energy when focusing on tasks that lead to success.

Keeping a positive attitude during a long sales cycle can be the difference between signing a deal and the hell of endless meetings. Focusing your energy on being positive at all times is a key to closing deals.

Five Things Successful Salespeople Always Do

1. Dress to impress.

2. Get their hair cut every month.

3. Take regular exercise.

4. Eat healthily.

5. Stay away from negative people.

Everybody sells something, everyday. So, it is just a matter of finding out where you do it best. There are plenty of different sales roles and types of selling, don’t obsess about one particular kind or even one company.

Always keep a growth mindset, every event either gets you closer to the deal or helps you improve for next time - learning is earning, just delayed a little.

You will never be perfect, so if there is something that you just cannot get you head around, then do not despair. It is perfectly okay to cover. That means you do your best and make it up elsewhere or you partner with someone who can help out for that part. You can cover any weakness by

• teaming up, get a friend to trade skills with you

• doing your best and accepting it won’t be perfect

• leaving it out if that’s is possible,

• outsourcing it to another department or even company or

• replacing it with something you can do, that is just as good - for example if you cannot do written quotes well, then do a presentation and add in a page of notes to show the details.

The point is to not be defined by your weaknesses, just cover them and focus on your strengths.

The customer relationship is dependent on these behaviours, the behaviours of a salesperson:

Communication (uses your emotional intelligence or EQ) - you create a trusting environment so clients happily reveal their needs. Your Empathy Quotient is your ability to see the world through your customer’s eyes - which really means understanding their customer better than they do and appreciating the way their company is structured and makes decisions.

Winning Trust = At its most basic level trust is built when promises made are kept. Positive reinforcement with a customer will get them used to not questioning your judgement and that is the very definition of trust.

Critical thinking (which uses your intelligence quotient or IQ) - you add value to your customer through re-framing their needs in ways that allow solutions to become clear. You use your knowledge, experience and your analytical skills to shine a light on problems that were dark and worrying for the customer.

You do this through asking hard questions in a soft way, by telling stories that show you understand and empathise, you have been in a similar situation and know what to do.

Personal Branding

You need to present a strong image of competence and dedication every day. You need to create a mask and a uniform that protect you and support your character. We’ve dealt with why looking good is so important.

You will need to make or find some affirmations that support your brand - the way global brands use their straplines. So, we all know that Audi, for example are “Vorsprung Durch Technic” or advancing through technology and that DHL are “excellence, simply delivered” - what are you? What do you want your customers to think as soon as they hear you name?

An important part of knowing who you are is knowing who you are not. You do this by confronting and facing down the inner demon we all have that says you are no good, you cannot do this, it’s all a waste of time. We will cover this in detail in the next section called Putting your best foot forward, but the idea is that you develop stories about yourself that cut these self doubts down to nothing.

Daily Practice:

Its great to have a strong sense of self and defences against self doubt but you need to remember this everyday. So, lets touch on Daily Practice.

To keep your brand topmost in your mind, you should develop a daily boot up practice (quick exercise - even three push ups will do it, healthy breakfast, prayers if that is your thing and then remember your main goal for today - to get that appointment, to close that deal, to get the slides done and sent off, whatever it is you have set for yourself).

To go with your daily boot up there needs to be a daily wind down / gratitude and appreciation practice:

• A “well done you”, for all your successes

• learnings: all the new things you found out, probably the hard way

• repairs: learning things often hurts, so remind yourself you are a work in progress and will be better next time

• release: forgive those who annoyed you, including yourself.

Put these disciplines in place and you have the building blocks of a personal brand.

Trust is a key way to build your brand, lets go into a bit more detail on that.

You develop a personal brand by consistently presenting a professional face to customers. When you keep hitting the same spot in the customer’s mind day after day, they will get the message that you are someone they can rely on. Once they trust you and know that you will always be a consummate professional, they will feel positive about calling on you as a resource for their planning and strategising, not just when they need a quote for a project already six months down the line.

There are three vital elements you must have in order to build your personal brand, over time. A professional salesperson in the business to business selling environment has to do the following:

1. Always know your numbers - yours customer’s most important numbers such as turnover, the savings they need to make, their operational dimensions, whatever they identify to you as important. Also, your own numbers such as the size of your company, savings achieved on average by customer, etc. KPIs to keep in mind, which numbers do you need to know.

2. You run the sales process. Do not let the customer or a sub-contractor take control of the flow of events that get you to the contract signing.

3. Industry knowledge - you must know the important people in your industry, not necessarily personally but who they are and what they said last week or last month about your prospects, politics or the future. You must know you own company news, share price, big projects going on elsewhere, moves that get announced to the public arena. You must also know about your customer’s wider pressures and personalities.

When we go to an interview we have to put our best foot forward. As a sales professional you are in this sort of high pressure meeting almost daily and you need to ensure you are at your best.

This is about having answers to questions about yourself. The benefits are threefold:

1. You have an instant ego boost document for those mornings when the duvet is more appealing than the motorway.

2. You have stories to tell your clients, when appropriate, that will show you in a good light.

3. When it does come time to move and you do an interview you will have the material and the practice to ace it.

These are seven key competencies sought after by prospective customers looking for a sales person they can believe in. You need a brief story to cover each one. You just need short five minute stories that show you in a positive way - proactive, adaptive and happy to lead and be part of a team.

1. Leading - where you had to take the lead on a project or in some other situation in order to succeed.

2. Supporting and cooperating - A situation where you actively supported a client beyond the normal expectation and made a big contribution to their success.

3. Influencing - Describe when you have changed someone’s mind and thereby saved the day.

4. Analysis - How do you go about analysing situations and deriving sense from complex sets of information.

5. Creativity - talk about a time when you developed and applied your solution or yourself in a novel way and came up with a solution to a significant problem for a customer.

6. Planned - tell us about a project you successfully managed, how it was organised and executed step by step.

7. Adaptability - How have you coped with set backs, failures and significant changes in projects, events. How did you respond, what did you learn, how do you use this now. Be careful with this type of story because it can lead the customer to believe that they can keep changing the scope of the project forever and the truth is that they cannot.

Every time you feel down because you have actually failed or just feel like you have you need to run your brain through the resilience machine.

First - Find out what the thought is in your head that is causing the noise and then you need to rebalance it. That is find another thought that takes away the power of the first one. Try flipping over the judgement associated with the thought, say to yourself, “Well, what if this is actually a good thing?”

By rebalancing the thought, you now have both feet back on the ground. This lets you come up with concrete things to do to make your world better.

The resilience machine takes bad thoughts and turns them into good actions. And whilst thoughts can be entertaining, it is actions that get things done.

People buy from people they like and trust, so creating a relationship with everyone within an account is a key part of winning business.

We have all heard the word Empathy being floated around as the way in which we open a relationship with someone. But what is empathy? Well, we can split it into three parts to better understand it and how to apply it.

• First element of empathy is cognitive empathy, which is the ability to understand another human being. This is very much a brain talent and so can be learned by experience and watching good actors, the way they communicate emotions with their voices and body language.

• You also need to have emotional empathy, the ability to feel what another person is feeling.

• Finally you need empathic concern, which is the deeply held desire to help other people.

Connecting to People has four parts that answer two questions that stay in your customer’s mind until they hear what they need.

Firstly - Do you actually care about me and my company?

Secondly - Are you any good at your job? Do you know what you are on about, can you give me the information that I need.

Everything you do with a client must strengthen the answers to these questions in their heads.

Your competence is judged from your actual behaviour - do you ask the right technical questions, do you have the toolset and know how to use it, have you had experience that informs the customer’s problem.

One point to note here is that in a study published in the Harvard Business Review several years ago, it was discovered that people would rather work with someone who was genuinely nice and caring and totally up to date with their craft. This is not a surprise but when it came to a choice between someone who was not as knowledgeable but was caring compared to someone who was a whizz kid but was also not as warm.

• Similarity is finding common areas with your contacts, same geography, school, university, football team, anything that creates a bridge.

• Compliments need to be handled carefully, but this is about being unremittingly positive about your contact and their company.

• Familiarity can be developed by using as much of the client’s terminology as possible, referencing common standards, relating stories they have heard already and adding a few new details.

• Association is simply using the positive aspects of brands, symbols and shared history to deepen a relationship.

Fear is one of those subjects we pretend doesn’t exist because we don’t have language to discuss it or the tools to deal with it. Well, now you do - because fear is either a very useful warning to yourself about a situation or a massive waste of energy, so it is vital to be able to tell the difference and act accordingly.

Quite simply, the answer to fear is courage, but courage is not the absence of fear rather it is the action of resisting it. You resist fear by chunking it down, making it smaller, turning it into events that you can face. Fear can always be countered through focused action, take the right sort of action depending on the type of fear you are experiencing.

There are many fears associated with a sales role:

• Fear of making the call, doing the meeting, getting challenged

• Fear associated with presenting, closing the deal, and asking for the contract / payment and referrals.

These are all, at heart, the same fear: fear of being rejected, excluded from the group.

First, you need to understand that fear is something that always focuses at a negative future and so, it can be balanced away by changing focus onto a positive result for the activity - change your narrative.

First ask yourself if you can affect the outcome of the situation you fear. Then ask yourself if the the threat you fear is immediate or just something you are always bringing up with yourself.

Now, if it is an immediate threat then take action straight away.

If it is one of the longer the fears then break it down into smaller parts and create actions to counter each part.

Now, lets look at the other option, where you cannot affect the outcome of the situation, it is a done deal. Then ask yourself the same questions about immediacy or not: if it is an immediate problem, for instance if the meeting is tomorrow, then ask yourself, “What is the worst that can happen?” And then prepare for it - make list of the likely actions to clear things up and make things right again.

If you cannot affect the outcome and it is one of those nagging, long term fears then get into the habit of distracting yourself every time it comes up - immediately replace the fear with a happy story about how good you are at something else.

Fear is a story you tell yourself, and so you can rewrite it. The stories seem to only disappear when you are in flow, in the moment, occupied by a task or the everyday wonder of living and not aware of all the self talk and criticism going on in your head.

Time Management -we all think we know how to manage our time, but in reality my experience in sales tells me we waste huge amounts of it just sorting out problems that aren’t actually ours to solve and sometimes are not even problems.

All you have is time and the energy you use during the time to get you where you want to go.

We all know that we are supposed to prioritise the urgent tasks over the merely important and prioritise the important over the trivial, to be honest that is just common sense. The real question is how do you actually do this?

You use two key questions to ask yourself when you are faced with competing tasks to get done in the same time period. First, to deal with urgent tasks (and they are all urgent) is to ask a simple question - how urgent is it, really?

Next, we ask ourselves if the problem actually belongs to me or not. Very often although we could solve the problem, it would be solved more efficiently, quicker, with less cost and disruption, if we left it to the right person.

This approach allows you to group urgent requests into buckets determined by when they need an answer and if you are the best person to provide that answer.

It is actually based on an algorithm used by software designers to manage the tasks undertaken by central processors, in order to keep the chips efficient. The grouping of priorities into the level of urgency saved around 30% of processor usage, just by deprioritising tasks that were not really urgent, they saved a third of the capacity of their machines.

It will have the same effect for you. It means you can spend your time doing what needs to really be done instead of constantly prioritising then reprioritising tasks.

A Radical Idea?

We all know that 80% of the value we deliver is in 20% of the time we have. So set aside one day per week just for all your top priority work to get done or at least be progressed.

Sales conversations are what we all do for a living. They are controlled by two vital questions:

Is this moving the sale forward?

                                And

Is this improving my relationship with this customer?

What do we mean by moving the sale forward?

• A Completed Stakeholder List

• What Is “Value” For Them?

• How Do They Do Business - Their Decision Processes

• Next Steps such as meetings, visits & networking

• Setting and agreeing limits on the scope of the sale

• It Can Include Deciding Not To Do Business

The second dimension is “Moving the Relationship Forward” and that means understanding what the world looks like from your customer’s point of view.

This videos gives you a tool to understand when you are progressing a sale and when you are just having a chat.

Why are questions so important? Quite simply, “The only thing you get without asking for it is disappointment.”

The old way of talking about questions was that there are two types: open questions and closed questions. A closed question leads to a yes or no answer from the other person and an open question is supposed to allow them to speak openly.

Meanwhile, in real life we find there are many different types of question, all doing different things during a sales conversation. So here are the ten reasons we actually ask questions, which will actually help you win business:

1. Getting information

2. Focussing the conversation towards a point

3. Pulling the conversation away from a point

4. Framing a conversation from the start

5. Demonstrating your knowledge

6. Uncovering the logic behind a position

7. Progressing a narrative

8. Showing empathy

9. Demonstrating shared experience.

10. People do not sell things to other people, they help them to buy things from them - questions are designed to get the customer to decide to buy themselves.

If you try and persuade customers to buy, then you open yourself up to objections. Now, if the objections are just to do with the product features then you can field them. But often the objections are driven by what the customer believes about themselves and so you wind up trying to change the customer, not sell them a product or service. Use questions to let them get there themselves. Once they do that they will actually object to anyone else trying to change that decision.

The cliche says that knowledge is power and the cliche is true - whoever has the most knowledge in a situation is in control of that situation.

This video splits down the balance of knowledge and therefore power into four sectors, a power balance lens, which will give you the understanding within a customer account so you can avoid the dangers of under selling or being out negotiated.

There are three types of knowledge that need to be looked at through the lens of knowledge power:

• The customer’s situation, the facts of their existing state

• The issues caused by this existing state and the implications they have for the way the customer does business.

• The next steps, or path to a future state.
  

The knowledge lens is made up of two dimensions: What we know or do not know and what the customer knows or doesn’t know. They should know about their own situation, but increasingly these days they expect you to find out about this yourself, as they are too time constrained to help much.

You do this by getting into the account and networking through the stakeholders. One of the main pieces of value you can bring to a business customer is your ability to develop a holistic view of it from your point of view, the point of view of an objective outsider with specialist knowledge.

Issues

This leads to analysing and defining their problems and issues. The conversations, questioning and data gathering to understand their processes will also allow you understand their issues.

Future State

The last area of knowledge that needs to be viewed through this lens is their future state, their vision for their company. Very often customers do not know what is achievable and need the sales person to help them define where they want to go. They will be able to provide a direction, but often not have a clear view about how fast they can go or how much it will cost and whether it will even be cost effective for them.

Listening is the beating heart of sales.

Three Basic Techniques

Firstly, difficult conversations and getting comfortable with discomfort.

Secondly, adding value from the first introduction meeting to the last lessons learned meeting.

Thirdly, “The consultancy skill set”. Five skills used by all the best consultants that are just as important as any technical skills and experience:

• Take questions from one area and ask them in another.

• Use what the learn with one team to inform your enquiries elsewhere.

• Pick up the company stories, the favourite anecdotes, myths and “oh that is typical us” stories that everyone tells about the company.

• Get the key measures sorted out quickly.

• Use your experience in other companies to inform your questioning. e

L.E.A.P. - A world class, proven technique to ensure you listen like a professional.

L stands for Listen, reflecting back the facts, active listening, not simply not talking, which many people think is the same as listening. Listen with the same passion with which you want to be heard.

The E stands for “Empathise”. Express your opinions, your rights and feelings, acknowledge their concerns. Tie their statement to your own experience in order to invoke empathy.

The “A” is for “Ask” - but only to clarify. Remember active listening is about reflecting and checking your understanding. Take notes to demonstrate that you are giving the speaker’s comments consideration.

And finally the “P” is for Pause - let them keep going with just that encouraging “Uh, Huh”. If you get no active response from them and if they are now in tune with you, then it is time to recommend a solution that suits you both.

The listening scale

People tend to fall on a scale of listening ability that goes from Forceful to helpful. People who listen forcefully are very active with questions and really want to get to the goal of the conversation as quickly as possible. People at the other end of the scale, people high in helpfulness just want the conversation to be a pleasant experience for all concerned.

Assertiveness

A well used and tested technique to control difficult situations:

Firstly, You understand and summarise the facts of the situation

Second, You indicate your feelings towards the situation

And finally, You state your requirements, your reasons and the benefits to the other person

For example, this construction often works well, you say:

“When you” - then state facts as you see them

Then you say: “I feel” - and you state what this does to you in plain language

And finish with: “I would like…” - and you tell the other person what you want instead.

“…and this will mean…” and you state the benefits to you and them of the new way of doing things.

Useful Methods

There are many strategies that will help you be more assertive. Here are a few to get you started:

Be clear, specific and direct in what you say.

Repeat your message if you encounter objections, try different ways to say it.

Remember to keep your voice down and your emotions in check.

Always ask for clarification if you are uncertain about something. So often disagreements are just about conflicting definitions of the same things.

Adopt appropriate body language to back up your assertion. Both feet on the floor, steady eye contact, remember to breathe, it helps you refocus your thoughts.

Keep calm and stick to the point. Bring the conversation back to the point if it wanders.

Call a time out if you feel weakened or threatened by the situation or if they look like they do.

Use this checklist next time you have a difficult conversation planned:

1. My desired outcome is…

2. I can settle when…

3. I can trade… to get a settlement

4. How can I be more specific and clear about what I say?

5. My three core messages are…

6. What evidence can I use to back up my request?

Four Types of Procurement Disruption

Process disruptions where the client wants to derail the sale, Personal disruptions, where they try to undermine you, Proposal disruptions when the prospect attacks your solution and finally Business disruptions where they set to have a problem with doing business with you at all.

Process Disruptions

If the customer says that they have issues with time, if they do no more than is required in terms of answering questions about their needs, if they question your methods or agenda endlessly then you have a process disruption.

The best way to deal with it is to find out if they have a better way of doing things and if so then simply use it or let them adapt your way of doing things whilst you retain overall control. It is wiser to use their objections than to fight them.

Personal Disruptions

This is when a customer continually acts dismissively or even aggressively towards you or your company, they are not participating fully using the excuse of being confused or in some way offended. The way to deal with them is to bring the session to a close as quickly as possible, rearrange for another day and ensure that reasonable third parties are present, from the customer organisation and ensure that a firm agenda is in place.

Proposal Disruptions

The disruptive customer will ask for increasing amounts of detail, debate definitions, go off on flights of intellectual fancy about what ifs and possibilities and continually disappear down paths that misdirect the course of the discussion.

The way to resist becoming defensive is to keep guiding them back onto the agreed agenda for the meeting. Be as assertive as you need to be.

Business Disruptions

These are the sort of objections you get from a customer who either does not have the authority to engage with you or really is not interested in doing business with you in the first place. The project is suddenly cancelled or put on indefinite hold, your business model is critiqued within an inch of its life or they ask for things that are way out of scope for the project as it stands.

Dealing with Experts is a core part of the sales role - your central position with the customer means you are always talking to people who know way more than you about customer systems, legal positions, regulatory boundaries, financials, operational details and on and on.

When dealing with experts it is important to acknowledge their status and that means you flatter their ego and show respect or else you risk creating a visceral enemy. Feel free to ask them to explain their working, because they should enjoy showing off how much they know.

The main danger is when they express opinions beyond their expertise but still credibility because they are so good at something else. To avoid this, separate business decisions from technical decisions. No technical expert will ever recommend anything involving risk because that would reflect on their reputation, but as you know, sometimes you have to accept risk as a part of a business decision.

Ensure they are kept within their areas of expertise and freely explore the bounds of their ability to predict outcomes and the future. Experts are are unlikely to use scenarios that involve all the relevant variables, because they know a lot about a narrow area and will stick to their safe area to protect themselves.

They will leave out context such as world events and the wider business environment. So, for example, they may say that a system cannot produce the volume of goods required but they cannot say whether that is the volume actually needed by the marketplace.

So, when you are dealing with experts, get their context defined, ask questions and keep them in their safety zone.

A salesperson’s worth can be measured partly in terms of their network.You have four important networks to look after as a sales professional. Each can be looked at in terms of three important factors:

• Access: This is the openness of a network, whether it requires special permissions to join such as a recommendation or a referral from an existing member or can just be joined freely.

• Range of members, this is the diversity of the people in the network. Are they all from the same business, the same business disciplines such as accountants, for example, are they all at a similar career stage, say all graduates.

• Connection type - this simple means how ell you know each person in the network, are they close friends or Facebook friends.

  
  

Pipeline Network

These are the people from whom you will build a pipeline. So social media, cold calling, etc. are all sources of names. You need lots of weak ties, as long as they know what you do, preferably in a story form rather than just marketing materials and you know what they do, preferably with three key facts, then that is enough.

Personal Network

These are the people who will support you in your work life. They do not all have to be close friends, they may have specific reasons for being there such as their access to other networks or their subject matter knowledge.

Project Network

The people who appear in the stakeholder matrix, which we discuss in the section on Stakeholder management. There will also be people from your own company in this network, external consultants and possibly people from quality, legislative and governing bodies who get involved with projects for reasons of certification, approval and oversight.

Professional Network

These are the people in the institutes, universities, quality and covering bodies mentioned above and also your past colleagues, customers and suppliers with whom it is worth keeping a connection.

Try this task to kick start yourself into creating a Pipeline Network

Define your existing professional network, it is the one you will use most for sales purposes. Go through Linked In and be honest about the connections in it that you could really send an email to in order to ask a quick question. Do the same for other social media platforms you use, Facebook, Instagram and be ruthless about whether the people listed are really contactable or not.

Then look through your phone list and gather all the names of people you think you have a reasonable chance of being able to reach out to on a professional matter. Make a single list of all the possible contact names.

Now, try this filtering mechanism:

Consider asking each contact the question, “We have a possible opening for a salesperson in my current organisation, can you recommend anyone?” Or a similar question where you are not asking much from them, just to give you some brief consideration and then possibly do another person a favour by recommending them for something.

Then score the names on the list like this:

• I have their phone number and I would be happy to ring them - Five stars.

• I have their phone number but would not use it, I would email them - Four stars.

• I would be okay to contact them via social media and would expect a reply - 3 stars.

• They might reply to social media contact, but I am not sure - 2 stars.

• I cannot imagine getting any response at all - 1 star.

Then for the 3 stars and less people - send the email / social media message. Anyone who does not reply needs to be taken off the list.

When it comes to networks only the four and five star people really count as useful contacts. They are the ones who care enough about you and your joint network to reply to reasonable requests, sent infrequently.

Keep feeding people into the three star and less category and then try to bring them up to four and five stars by asking for small favours and sending them useful information in the form of links, or material you or our company have produced that you absolutely know will be of interest to them.

Influence

Robert Cialdini identified six “laws” of influence and I have included my interpretation of them as they affect the world of business to business sales below.

Reciprocity is when you give something in full expectation that you'll get something in return. It's the basis of our entire economic system I'll give you money and you give me goods. Giving something (apparently) for nothing to a customer is a good way of then getting them to commit some time and effort to listen to your pitch, but be careful that the exchange is fair and equitable for both sides.

Consistency is as important in sales as it is in the world of politics. This is because consistency builds trust, trust builds relationships and relationships build careers.

Authority is about appearing to hold a position where what you say has to be obeyed and this ties in with expertise, whoever has the expertise gets to call the shots. Establish your own authority within a customer relationship using the following levers:

1. Always know you numbers

2. Control the sales journey

3. Knowledge of the industry, gravitas and standing as an industry professional.

Liking is covered in another section, but also summarised here for completeness:

1. Similarity

2. Compliments

3. Contact and Cooperation (Familiarity)

4. Conditioning / Association

Social Proof is when we see other members of the group doing something and automatically take an interest and want to try it ourselves. When we see enough people, even strangers, doing a particular thing, we will actually feel excluded and less than others until we can do the same.

Scarcity is the effect of wanting what we think we cannot have, what is out of reach due to lack of availability or restricted access.

This is a “stop, start and continue” coaching format section.

Firstly, Stop - Stop thinking about what you are going to say next whilst somebody else is talking to you.

Start - There is a really useful technique that consultants use to get client to reveal ever greater detail. They simply nod and say, ”Uh, huh”, this encourages others to carry on speaking. Nodding and just making that sound will naturally keep your clients talking.

Continue - Keep being yourself in interactions, sometimes we think we are supposed to be very clever people who can read other people’s minds and understand everything we hear first time. Ask the stupid question - actually the only truly stupid question is the one that doesn’t get asked at all.

The attached resource is a complete summary of all the subject matter in the videos in the Personal section of the House of Sales - enjoy!

Welcome to the Pipeline module of the House of Sales, this section shows you what you need to do to create your success by looking after you pipeline of customers.

Maya Angelou once said, “Nothing will work unless you do.” And I believe she absolutely nailed the whole concept of pipeline management in that simple quote. Pipeline management is about hard work and numbers, but once you know that it is actually easy.

Pipeline management is the bedrock of a successful sales organisation and your sales career. As much as we talk about persuasion and the processes for navigating through a company, ultimately sales is a game of numbers. The more possible customers you have the more qualified prospects you can create and the more you will sell.

This is what you will learn in this section:

• The elements that make a sale

• What success in sales actually is… and isn’t

• Unique research results about how pipelines really work

• How to spend your time so that you keep your pipeline full

• The correct way to run an initial sales meeting

• How to identify your customer’s real needs

• The difference between a buying cycle and a selling cycle and why it matters.

Five Things Successful Salespeople never do:

1. Go more than two days without making a call. The number of first calls you need to make in order to get a first meeting may well be ten, twenty or more to one. The leaky pipeline is something we will discuss in this section, but to summarise, you can lose up to 70% of prospect opportunities during a B2B sales cycle. So your overall hit rate will most likely be less than one closed deal per 30 plus initial contacts. In which case you better make the first 29 calls quickly, so you can get to the one that will generate your commission.

2. They never Oversell or undersell - they tell the truth (with a little wiggle room). There is no point over selling your product or service because if you do then by definition you will under deliver and the word will be out there in the market that you are not to be trusted. Your personal brand is your most important asset, more important than anything you sell, once it is tarnished you are in trouble - so protect your reputation like your livelihood depended on it because it does. Obviously under selling is just false modesty.

3. Successful salespeople do not think that prospects move along the pipeline by themselves. If they are motivated to keep the sale moving then you should still be hurrying them along just a bit faster, it shows you are keen, dedicated and focused on them.

4. Successful salespeople Never talk politics with a prospect, even if they agree with you, their colleague won’t.

5. Finally, successful salespeople never check email first thing - if it is urgent then the person will leave a voicemail, otherwise they can wait until you have done your three most urgent tasks.

The 9 elements of a sale.

First you need a person with a problem. Now it is perfectly possible to find a person who doesn’t realise they have a problem until they meet you, but whether they know it or not they still have to have a problem, otherwise you cannot add any value to their lives. You add value through your product or service and the way in which you sell and deliver it.

Next, the logic of buying your product combines with the emotion you generate around the product to create a preference within the prospective customer. If they also have the money and the authority to spend that money then you have all the necessary prerequisites of a sale.

You don’t actually have a qualified sale until your own organisation has looked at the deal and decided that is makes sense for them too.

Emotions

These are what drive even the most tightly controlled procurement exercise because ultimately someone has to press the go button and that person is as emotionally dependent as every other person on the planet. So, how do you generate an emotional response to your product or service?

Asking questions about where your prospect is having pain and then telling them all about your wonderful features and benefits does not actually add any value for them. Where you can grab their attention is by telling them stories that resonate with their situation, demonstrating skills you have or can access that can address their situation and helping them to create meaning from their situation.

This means giving them the reasons why they need to solve their problems and also why they need to do it now. A potential client without a sense of urgency is like a parcel without an address, it may have all the right contents but it is going nowhere.

Emotions are derived from helping them create a clear picture in their own mind of their burning platform, their logical next step, they route to freedom and their ultimate victory.

The Leaky Pipeline

We all know that pipelines leak, customers fall by the wayside, projects get cancelled. When I was defining sales best practice for one of the world’s largest companies, I noticed that almost every team reported about a 30% to 35% sales success rate. They did not all have the same definition of a successful sale, for some it was getting a contract for others it was renewing business but that number did not vary across the entire world.

From where I sat, it looked like our sales pipelines were a lot more leaky than that, so I decided to do my own research.

I split it into three rough stages that could be used consistently across all the sales team types. Within each step, I further looked at three sub steps, to get a more detailed view of where the deals were dropping out of the pipeline. The important thing is that the rate of attrition from step to step is much higher than we realised because we had never monitored the exact stage at which customer opportunities were disappearing.

First step was “Filling the Pipeline” or prospecting, this was between the first meeting and the sale being declared good enough to go in the pipeline as a real prospect, 30% of projects survived, that is 70% disappeared.

The second step was “Developing the Sale”, moving the sale from entering the pipeline to being fully defined and ready for contract negotiation, a further 30% of prospects fell by the wayside.

In the last phase of the sale, “Emptying the Pipeline”, from contract negotiation to the close of the sale project, we lost a further 30% of the clients, if we had started with 30, as stated above, we therefore ended up with 4 paying clients.

This is a success rate of 13%, not the 30% to 35% we always quoted, which was just relevant for the first stage of any sale.

So, the shocking truth about leaky pipelines is that for every 30 first meetings you may get 4 closed deals. For every closed deal you will then need to get around 8 new prospects to replace the happy customer in the pipeline. Think about how many calls or marketing shots it takes to get each first call, you will know your number, ours was 10 calls for a first meeting, and you should have some idea why you never go more than two days without making a significant move to fill your pipeline - a cold call, an email shot, an exhibition follow up, a referral introduction.

Time Allocation

The leaky pipeline is a cold, hard dose of reality - but what do I do about it, other than increase the input to my pipeline by a factor of three? Well, one of the key things we did, once we had discovered this shocking truth, was to translate it into a way of allocating sales people’s time. This turned out to be quite easy, you will notice that the total number of meetings included in the graph adds up to 99, which is close enough to 100, allowing for rounding. The graph I showed is actually the normalised version, so that each bar not only shows us how many opportunities are left at each stage but also tells us where the time was being spent in percentage terms.

So if you look at the first stage of the process, from first meeting to qualifying the customer, it represents 59 meetings or events that progress the sale, from a total of 99 events across the whole process for first meeting to close. That is sixty percent of your time spent qualifying, when you add in the time spent arranging these meetings (which because they are early stage often get moved around) it will bring it easily to two thirds. That is up to three or three and a half days every week. You only have one and a half days for the rest of your process.

You will require 10 discovery meetings to get 8 project definition meetings which will provide 7 project agreement meetings. Notice there is a thirty percent drop out rate here, you go to find the needs and they are insufficient for a project, or there is no real recognition of a problem to solve. This is a heartbreaking statistic in reality because you have invested time and effort to get to this stage with all of the prospects and one in three will pull out on you, on average. In any typical week these will represent one day in total.

The final phase from 6 project kick off meetings to get 5 negotiation meetings and finally 4 clients actually signing on the dotted line, is perhaps the hardest drop in the numbers. These clients have come a long way with you and losing them at the final hurdles is a waste of money and time. In reality these numbers can be reduced by compromising and negotiation, in fact last minute negotiation tactics seems to be the cause of most of this waste. In time terms, these should take one day a week. They also require expertise beyond your own, so can be outsourced within your team, though not completely without supervision unless you want the attrition rate to soar.

So, to summarise these figures, 4 out of 99 meetings will be focused on closing the sale, that is, from 30 first meetings you get 4 sales, so make 26 of them as brief as possible. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to tell which ones are the duds. You will lose clients right up to the contract phase because lawyers cannot agree some detail or circumstances intervene.

Working Backwards to see How many Meetings you need to book in

You can work out your typical yearly work profile by looking at these figures. A typical business to business sales person should bring in deals worth five or more times their salary in profit. So, a salesperson on $50k a year basic salary, for ease of calculation, will need to bring in profit of $250k every year.

Now, if your net profit margin is 5%, say, then that means you need deals worth $5m each year in order to get $250k profit. So that could be four deals worth $1.25m each. But, if your typical deal size is less than that, say $0.5m each then you are looking at ten deals in a year. The graph only shows four deals per year, so if your typical deal size is $0.5m then that means the numbers in the graph need to be multiplied by 2.5 so that there are ten deals closing during the year.

So, to be clear, that means seventy first meetings arranged during the year, two per week allowing for vacations. How many cold calls result in getting first meeting? Well, typically that runs from 1 in five to 1 in ten or more, so if cold calling is your way of generating business you need to be doing at least three a day, based on the figures we just went through.

The Prospecting Action Plan

Sources of new contacts include face to face meetings, online media, old school ways such as cold calling, warm calls (referrals). Remember to use all your networks, as described previously to feed new contacts into your pipeline network, your profession, personal and project networks can all provide possible avenues to explore for new business.

The first thing you have to have before you start prospecting is a clear idea of who your product or service appeals to. Start with your best current client, they have the ideal profile. Another great place to look is your own “tribe”, customers who have as much in common with you as possible, in terms of culture, geography, sector focus, etc.

The Magic Formula

First, say something nice about the person, make the comment relevant and particular to the person.

Second, find and discuss some common ground. If its online then include your view on the headline for the Tweet, email or post. Always make your comments positive and stay away from anything that could be considered gossipy, culturally insensitive or uncomplimentary, even to the competition.

Finally, ask them something to get them talking and engaged in the conversation. Go for something that demonstrates as much knowledge about them as you have and remember your LEAP lesson earlier. Once you have established a conversation it is up to you to judge how to close it - asking for a follow up is the usual way.

An Elevator Pitch.

1. First, give them your card, make sure it has your details on it.

2. Then you should have one sentence that establishes your credibility, a statement of qualifications or your connection to the person.

3. Next you state the Benefits of listening to you, which is what you are selling expressed as benefits to listener.

4. If there is time then give them a quick list of items on offer.

5. Briefly describe the ideal listener to this story as the person in front of you and deliver the call to action - …you have my card.

Four Principles of Getting New Business

There are a four key ideas about new business that we need to establish right from the beginning so we can be sure we all have the same view of what good business is . Not all new business is good business, after this video you will know the difference.

Principle 1 - Find the “F.A.N.”

You cannot sell to someone who is not buying. Find the person with the problem (the “N” stands for need) and you can develop a solution. Then you need to find the person with the money to pay for it, the “F” stands for finance. Then you need to find the person with the authority, no prizes for guessing that is the “A”, to give the project the go ahead, again this may or may not be the same person.

This person will either be your customer coach, that is, your key point of contact within the customer organisation or they will introduce you to someone who will fulfil this function.

Principle 2 - Protect Your Resources

Qualify the prospect, make an estimate of the likelihood of the deal happening, the size of the prize and the timescale for it.

Principle 3 - Be Aware of Competitors

Understand the competition and what your sources of strength are against theirs in the eyes of your customer, not just in your own opinion. Also be aware that you will have other competitors called, “Do nothing”, “Wait till next year”, “Let’s do it ourselves”, and, “Trim the project back until it is not worth it”.

Principle 4 - Focus on What you can control

You can control your own behaviour and what your company can deliver. You cannot control the customer , their beliefs, their marketplace and hence you cannot control the outcome of your sales efforts. So success in sales is all about focusing your energies on what will being the biggest return.

The Shape of a successful sales call.

You have two goals - to get your story understood and to understand the potential customer’s story. Your story is your library of case studies, filtered so they are appropriate for the customer in front of you.

Your customer’s story will need have these following elements:

Firstly, their situation now and secondly, the problems currently driving the need for change, what the problems mean to them now. There will be problems that really do not matter mixed in with the ones that really do matter, you can help them tell the difference using your experience.

Thirdly, you need to understand their progress to date. Fourthly, what does the customer need to happen now, the burning platform that the customer is on. Finally, you can discuss what success will look like.

The Structure of a Sales Call.

Open

After some friendly small talk, confirm the customer’s goal for the meeting and tell them yours. Lay out your agenda, keep it simple and focused on their requirement, then ask them what they want to include in it and check the timing for the meeting.

Discovery

Ask questions, and listen out for needs, and specifically for the people to whom who those needs belong, i.e. the stakeholders. In addition you have to listen out for how they measure the effect of their needs - what numbers they collect or monitor that tell them that they have a problem.

Capability

You can convert vague (implied) needs into concrete reasons for action (real needs) this by using stories demonstrating your capabilities - where you helped a similar client with a specific problem related to the issue your customer has just raised.

When you do this any objections are minimised because you are only talking to the client’s agenda, not your own sales pitch. Your stories will be relevant to the conversation not just wedged in to show how great your company is.

Once you have gone around the discovery / capability loop a few times and created a list of specific issues that can be measured then remember to ask, “Anything else?” And stay silent until the customer confirms they have told you everything.

Commitment

Summarise what they have told you so far, if you have time then prioritise their needs. Ask them for a commitment to move ahead with the discovery work that will have come up during the meeting, the actions where you or the client needed to find out more information or provide more data.

After the call

Always do a quick lessons learned exercise after every call - on the way home ask yourself: What three things do I wish I had done that I did not do during that call?

Call Success

A phrase to remember is, “Always Be Qualifying,” remember that the only failure in sales is wasting time, so always be on the look out for signs that the customer is sincere in their requirement. If you get the sense that the are not then you have permission to tactfully ask them, as it shows respect for your own time and theirs.

What call success is not: continuations, where nothing is agreed, but there is no clear refusal to do business. You know a continuance because you have nothing to put in the “actions” section of the meeting notes, you have to start again justifying the next meeting or you have done ten meetings / calls and still no order form.

Qualification - sorting the wheat from the chaff when it comes to customers.

The Scoring Sheet: The primary tool of qualification is the scoring sheet.

Everything you and our company needs from a customer is listed on it and scored against an imaginary perfect customer. You can derive this from the customer profile that we discussed in the Prospecting action plan, where we talked about ideal customers.

Once you have created your qualification template then you use it in two ways. Firstly it is a guide to whether you should do business with the customer at all. If they do not score highly enough or do not meet absolute conditions then they are not really customers.

This brings you to the second way in which you can use the tool - look at where they score low and see if there is a way you can improve the score.

The qualification tool effectively generates an action plan that gets a low probability prospect moving towards being a good customer.

The qualification sunrise chart: Look at the score from your qualification tool and ask yourself the questions:

1. How much effort is it going to take to get this customer into shape?

2. How much benefit are they going to bring over the short and long term?

Buying cycles and selling cycles and why it is important to know the difference.

I have a unique profile of experience, having been successful as salesman and sales leader, a procurement director and an operations director. It has given me a particularly clear view on how a company actually buys anything.

Sales View

You fill your pipeline with suspects and set up as many meetings as possible to filter these down to a group of prospects or likely customers. Then you qualify these further by identifying an opportunity with them. You develop proposal, negotiate a contract and then implement your solution. From then on this customer is account managed in order to generate new sales.

The Operations View

Typically the requirement for a new product or service sits with operations, so they are the ones who know what is required and what that is really worth to their organisation.

They define the problem that needs to be solved. Then look at the market place and see what solutions exist to answer this requirement. This will very often be a process of education about what is possible. Then they reach out to suppliers on a tentative basis, to understand what solutions cost, what they can really deliver, what timescales are realistic. An operations buyer will believe they are 60% or more done with the buying process before they even contact a seller.

The Procurement view

Procurement always wants to start with a defined business need. Next they will want to fit the buy into their procurement strategy. They will evaluate suppliers based on scoring mechanisms. Then negotiations, which for procurement is actually the main focus of the process. They will disappear for onboarding and implementation of the solution.

Which One Is The One I Should Care About?

The real buying process is followed by the operators - the people who actually have the problem, need the solution and will live with it in the long term. They understand what they need and can be educated on what is possible and what is not. They are the ones who will use you again if you get it right.

A summary of all the key material included in the Pipeline section, in an easy to read format.

Welcome to the Section of the House of Sales called “Problem”, guaranteed to help you solve a whole host of your problems by showing you how to define value in a revolutionary new way that takes your customer problems clean away. I am really excited about this section because it presents some revolutionary new concepts that I have developed over the last fifteen years that really get to the heart of what successful high-earnings selling is all about.

These ideas and methods will give you a vital part of the toolkit you need to realise your full potential to become a sales superstar. Don’t worry, there is nothing complicated about what you will learn, it is simple once you hear it and try it and you will wonder why you never realised it before.

As Zig Ziglar, the legendary sales author and speaker once said, “Don’t become a wandering generality. Be a meaningful specific.” And at the end of this section you will be able to talk to a client about their specific needs in a way that is unique to them and so cuts through any and all barriers to them signing on the dotted line.

As a growing sales professional, I guarantee you have asked yourself important questions like these:

• What are four secret ways I can show my customer that I am their best choice?

• How can I define value in an easy and meaningful way?

• How can I amplify the benefits I can bring to my customers so they see my product as vital and me as indispensable?

• How do I stop the customer from driving my price down?

  
  

We will answer those questions and more. These are some of the exciting topics you will master in this section:

• How you sell value in the real world.

• How you can be a resource to your customers, so they rely on you as a team member.

• What value actually means and I give you a revolutionary new way to use it.

• You will see clearly the indicators that show you where value exists and the impact of delivering it.

• We look at the power of undiscovered needs - the competitive edge you need in sales.

• You will be able to present information and analysis to a client in a way that pumps up the value you provide.

• You will be able to resist clients trying to negotiate you down by using loose language.

And finally we look at how you can protect your pricing when a client questions it.

You Sell Value

This is one of the most important concepts in modern selling, businesses are looking to buy value, and the product or service that brings it can be like an after thought. For example, I worked for a company whose main sales pitch was that they would increase customer profits by 10% - the way we did it was by merchandising the stock in a store so that only the best sellers were taking up store space. We were asked when we could start far more often than how the system worked.

The primary purpose of selling is to find out where you can add value to a customer’s business and how much. If it is worth enough value then the customer will want to do it, the higher the value the quicker they will want it done. So, given the customer focus is the same as yours, why isn’t every call a sale? Well, one of the key areas of conflict is around price. We need to move the conversation about value away from price and onto other factors that boost the customer’s operations, and they are many.

Your solution is just a set of slides until it actually solves a real problem for your customer, then it starts to have value. The level of value is proportional to the size of the problem it solves and for whom it solves it. Remember that all stakeholders are not equal when it comes to budget, resource and attention allocation, so the safety bet is to have value for all your stakeholders. If you cannot do that then make sure you can add value for the key stakeholders and that the others involved are either neutral or not negatively affected in a significant way.

So you gather data, information and stories as you network through the client organisation. It is easiest to get customer stories by telling some of your own first, this also gives you a chance to demonstrate expertise and educate your customer on your product’s value. As you gather intelligence from the customer you can start to add meaning to it, by putting it into context, this creates value.

Next you can show the gap between where they are and where they need to be - so in the last example, they may have insufficient resource or investment on their forecasting facility. Finally, you define the goal they need to achieve and look at what that would mean to them. So, you set out a goal of, say, increasing forecasting accuracy by 10% and calculate that this would reduce inventory by 5%, increase stock availability by 5% and so increase sales by 5%.

That’s all nice and straightforward, but there is a Problem with Solutions

Let’s say, you meet all your stakeholders and get their view of what constitutes value and everyone is happy that your product or service does add value, that is job done, right? If this does ever happen to you then an alarm bell should immediately ring because what constitutes value for one department inevitably will have a consequence in another, often requiring change in existing practices. Now, it may actually be of advantage to the other department, but change is never immediately perceived as good without discussion and adjustment.

If everyone agrees that your solution is of benefit to all then I would suggest they are not all talking about the same solution. They will have projected onto your proposal whatever they wanted to hear or just not thought the whole thing through in enough detail. This is usual and it is your job to bring everyone up to speed with the big picture of what life in the world of your solution really looks like.

Finally, let’s consider The Value of Process

Part of the value you are providing to your customer is the sales process. The way you sell is a reflection of the way you will deliver, support and account manage that customer into the future. There is more to it, however. Customers need to be able to defend the decisions they make, they will need a solid narrative for choosing you. Providing them with a plan for the sale, from early data gathering, stakeholder engagement, value proposition creation, presentation of solution and refinement of offer will make them feel secure in your hands.

This is brand enhancement, people are buying into you as much as your product, so they have to be happy with the way you sell. You become their salesperson of choice because you have bothered to reduce their risk of making a wrong decision or not being able to explain why they made the right decision, which can be just as bad.

So, to summarise, you sell value by setting out a plan that shows the customer where they are now, where they have to get to and the benefits of making the journey in terms of financial savings, increased income, and positive effects on whatever they measure and value as a company. You need to be aware that there will be some winners and some losers in any solution, even if the loss is just having to do the implementation and so lose their old ways and methods.

Finally, the way in which you conduct the sale adds value in itself because it is a key indicator of how you will serve the customer.

It is vital that in any sales project, you are a Hero.

That is an acronym that helps you remember how to be an indispensable resource for your customers.

These days if you do not add value through the actions of selling then you will not get a second meeting. Customers do not have time to listen to an endless pitch from sales people about how great their product is. Probably the most important but obvious fact in this entire course is that customers only care about customers. They care about their company, their team, their business unit and themselves and not necessary in that order.

• Be a Hub within the customer company and for the customer across organisations. You make connections within the customer and with like minded individuals in other customers. By connecting the customer to others you become a vital part of their network building capability and we all know how important that is these days in ever aspect of business.

• E is for expert - you know how your product and service add value to customers, so you must be able to talk like an expert in your field. When you don’t know, find out, an expert doesn’t know everything, but they do know how to find out through contacts, knowing where to look it up or their own experience. I was amazed how easy it was to reach out within my own networks to ask questions that I could then answer for customers, making me look and sound like the expert I needed to be for them. As time goes on, you gain the expertise actually this way.

• Resource - you make yourself available to talk about their business, not just your own and not just when a sale is around the corner. By being there when they need to bounce ideas around or need a quick opinion or help with an analysis you move from being a salesperson in their eyes and into the resource section of their brain. You become a go to expert, a partner they can trust and big ticket B2B selling is all about trust.

  
  

• Organiser - you know what step comes next in the pan that gets them from problem to solution. Even when you don’t know what the project is yet - you need project management skills to get their ideas organised and integrated with your experience so that you can produce an outline roadmap. The one thing you need to control are he steps by which the sale happens, you do this by always being the one with a plan, even if you have to let others sort out bits of it, you retain the blueprint of the deal. You are managing the total process, you know what the score is, where the risks are, what needs to happen next and who needs to be involved.

There is one caveat to being a HERO - As we know because I keep telling you, the only failure in sales is wasting time, so you cannot be a HERO for every account, you have to do a quick estimate of the return you will get on your efforts before you commit to offer this service. That way you can offer it in a meaningful and wholehearted way for the really important accounts and not be run ragged trying to do it for everyone.

The Value Equation is exclusive to this course, so you are getting an unfair advantage over every other salesperson you come up against.

I am aware the expression is actually an inequality rather than an equation because it does not have an equals sign in the middle but a greater than sign. It is just easier to call it an equation.

So - in two sentences, here is the value equation that defines every successful sale:

The Advantages of the new way of doing something minus the benefits of staying as we are represents the net value of the change - the overall upside to doing the project. If this is greater than the overall costs of the project by enough of a difference then the project is worth it.

But - These costs are simply the actual cost of the change - you must also factor in the costs you face if you do not do the project. This is the factor that is invariably left out of cost benefit calculations. We will go into much greater detail below so that you really understand how profound this understanding is.

Now, a traditional approach to selling is to say that if you remove all the barriers and objections a customer has to buying your product then they will buy. So you diligently tell them about the product - all the elements of the A (advantage) term in the equation, and as every objection arises you knock it down and turn it around - the elements of the B term in the equation and some of the elements of the C term. Then you get to the end of the conversation and ask for the order and your quota is secured, that’s right isn’t it? Except we all know it does not work like that, you can take away all the objections and still not get the customer to buy, because clearing the road does not actually get them to travel along it.

They may be able to see the bright future at the other end of the project, but from where they stand, they are doing just fine anyway, so why bother taking the chance? That is they understand A - advantages of the new word but do not see it on its own as bigger than B the benefits of their current state with the addition of the cost of change, the C term.

The D and C terms - the dangers of doing nothing and the costs of the project are so important because they are the items that represent a loss to the customer. The costs are a clear loss because they will have to pay out money and perhaps lose a few other things along the way such as tried and tested methods or even people. The Dangers term as a loss is all too easy to ignore becase we all do it - we all tend to ignore the dangers of not taking actions by putting them off into the far future where they are invisible or distracting ourselves with every day tasks so their noise is drowned out by busy work. If you need proof of this just ask yourself why you keep putting off the medical check up or reviewing your pension arrangements, we all run from future dangers because they seem so impossible to control and so far away.

We fear loss much more than we desire gain. Psychologists have estimated the difference to be as much as ten times depending on whose data you believe - so we would fear losing a dollar as much or more than gaining ten dollars. Again if you want proof then just ask a colleague to do this experiment. Ask them to give you five dollars and tell them you will toss a coin and if it is heads you will keep the five dollars and if it is tails you will give them fifty dollars back, next year. No one will go for it, even when we gain, we fear losing out more.

Typically in a sales encounter we put a value on C, the cost of everything and stay away from the D, the danger and real costs of not acting. In fact most customers are keen to get C defined down to the last cent and most salespeople are less keen on including all the costs up front - it becomes a little game sometimes. This is assumed to be understood by the customer and the sales person does not want to appear pushy, negative or as if they are trying to scare anyone into action. So that means you have to be careful about how you present D but do not ignore it, it is your hidden secret weapon.

So, now you have a good view of a powerful sales concept that can transform your way of thinking about why some customers close and some never will. Get you value equation right and the rest is plain sailing. In part two we discuss the equation further and go into more detail on the terms.

Welcome back to the second part of the Value equation. Now, when we look at the consequences of not doing a project we only need to increase the perceived losses by a few percent to massively increase the perception of loss. Unfortunately it is similar with the cost - the C term, a small increase can be judged to be significant when percent wise it really is not. That is why it makes sense to keep C and D together and discount them against each other.

An example of this is the way the customer will often become fixated on a small additional cost during negotiations, such as in my own experience, the cost of shipping of a multi million pound CT scanners. When we suggested using a premium shipping service that cost an extra few hundred dollars, the customer balked, even though the total deal size was ten million dollars plus. We countered by explaining that using the service significantly offset the risk in delays because the shipper would store for free and the customer agreed because they knew the chance of a delay due to financial process issues was practically a certainty. Clear demonstration that we are way more sensitive to costs, perceived as losses than we are to gains, perceived as advantages.

D is really very important because it represents the known disadvantages of the Current situation plus the unknown dangers of doing nothing and gives you a license to work on factors that are less established in reality and more likely to be present in the customer’s perception of reality.

There is a thing called the Ellsberg paradox which states that people will choose the option that provides them with the least ambiguity rather than the most utility. They will choose to draw a ball from an urn with a known mix of red and green balls rather than from an urn where the mix is unknown. They will always choose the option that has the least uncertainty, the safest route. Although you may find individuals that are exceptions to this rule, you will not find organisations that are exceptions because caution always wins out in big companies, history bears this out. As the saying goes, no one very got fired for choosing IBM.

One of the ways you can increase the sense of danger in doing nothing is to change the focus of the conversations you have with the customer. They will always focus on themselves, you can widen this discussion by getting them to focus on their stakeholders; in particular their customers, strategic suppliers, shareholders and staff. This increases the possibility for unknown events to occur, the inevitable “what if” scenarios that they have not thought of.

We all have a limited amount of time, energy, experience and perspective on our life and our work roles. This leads to inherent biases in how we view the benefits and risks of a solution. There are some biases that are common to all of us and that need to be discussed so that when you are constructing the value statement for a company or even a particular stakeholder in a customer, you can make it as fair and reasonable as possible.

The best people to do this are the stakeholders within the customer company themselves and this will be talked about later in the “People” section. Initially when you are just putting together the beginnings of a statement, use your colleagues and your company coach and whoever they can easily recommend to you. It is where your previous experience with other customers as an individual and across your company can really pay dividends, by reusing value equations you have created before.

Let’s talk about how you use the Value Expression to create an irresistible logic and emotional path for a customer to follow. We are going to go through the terms in the expression and use them to generate statements that make it clear the reasons why your customer should go for your solution.

So, first you look at your A terms - the advantages your solution offers to customers, all its benefits and positives. Pick out the ones that are relevant to your customer and shelve the rest. Whilst you might be tempted to throw in a few extra features just for good measure, this is a mistake, it just dilutes your core message to the customer. Humans are good at remembering five to seven things at a time, if you start adding loads of smaller advantages, it will just distract from the items you really want to hit home.

Next, be honest about the B’s, the benefits of the customer doing nothing - nobody really wants to change anything if they can possibly avoid it. There is a fundamental law called the Principle of Least Energy that says everything assumes the shape that takes the least amount of energy to maintain - think about why bubbles are spheres or why lions only hunt their next meal rather than killing the entire herd of gazelle and relaxing for a few days. So, there is a reason the customer is in the situation they are currently in and unless they admit they have a fire burning then the B’s can delay or derail a sale. The reasons they are where they are will be real things to be taken into account, not just excuses for laziness, they represent genuine issues that you need to be able to reduce in importance or discount for them entirely by bringing in a D factor, a danger in staying the same or an A factor, why your solution is superior.

Now, everyone focuses on the C factors, the costs, because they are such an easy target, they are already expressed in dollars or pounds or euros. They will be amongst the first thing a customer wants from you, an estimate of the costs fo the project. Never refer to it as a cost to your customer, but as an investment to move them forward, avoid problems, improve performance. Be aware that when they first ask for a cost estimate, they are just finding out if they are in the right shop - there is nothing worse than going shopping to buy a pair of roller skates and accidentally finding yourself in a Rolls Royce dealership. Emphasise where a cost, a C covers multiple advantages, A factors.

Now the D’s, the big scary dangers of doing nothing - these are the factors that are the opposite of the B’s, they are the downside of staying the same. Every B is an actual or perceived thing in the customer’s mind and can be traced back to a real situation, where the D’s refer to a future state. This means that there is much more possibility to be creative about them than they can be with the B’s. As long as any scenario you come up with is reasonable you can start hanging D’s on it.

Try and have a D for each B - so every benefit of staying the same has a danger associated with it - for example, the customer says, if we stay the same we have no disruption to operations, which is true, but the danger is then that eventually they will have to update themselves and at that point it will be much more urgent, whereas if they do it now they get to be in control of the rate of change.

Every D, danger should have an A, advantage of the new world, that takes it away - for example if there is danger that by doing nothing the customer will fall below an industry standard or quality mark then there should be a future of your solution, an A that ensures this cannot happen.

So, that is how you analyse the Value equation, take each term and work through them to give yourself a clear view of where you have a compelling reason for the customer to change and where you need to put some effort into strengthening your proposition.

Analysing the value Equation Shortcut

Here is another view to help you generate the items in your value expression. Some of my students have found it easier to group the terms on each side of the expression to create story for each side.

A-B gives the net opportunity for your solution. The difference between the two terms is the vision for the project, it is the ideal new state of the customer. So if you get stuck try, listing out all the wonderful parts of their new world once the project is complete - keep the new items for your As and put any existing items into the B category and try to downplay them.

Look at your list of Advantages (A) of the new solution and see if they tie in with any of the Benefits of the old solution. Where there is a correlation or a direct match, make a note, as that is an opportunity to make a positive statement to your customer. You can couch it in terms that they are retaining existing functions or capabilities, people like it when things don’t change remember.

Your statements of the A-B, the “good Place” they are going to - need to be easy to remember and couched in terms the customer will understand and use themselves. Use their jargon, their measures, their understanding of their business where possible.

Use the comparison of B, the benefits of staying the same, to C, the cost of changing, to show the areas where you need to cover for any awkward questions. It is the happy hunting ground of anyone who does not want to change (the person who will ask “why should we bother spending money when we already have…this feature or that benefit”). They will want to ignore your list of A items and your list of D items, so you need to construct arguments that include both.

For example - they may say, why should we bother to move our manufacturing plant when we have so many good people already employed there, it will be spending money better used elsewhere? You need to have answers in place that undermine the assumption of everything currently being perfect, for example,” Well you do have good people but they are also the most expensive in your industry and most of your competitors have moved to lower cost areas and found ready workforces of similar quality.”

Finally look at the C’s the costs of changing in comparison to the Ds, the danger of ding nothing. This is where you get to use the time cost of money to your advantage. By pointing out that a dollar spent today can avoid ten, a hundred, a thousand dollars that would need to be spent in the future. We all know the wisdom of repairing the roof before the storm come, the wisdom of fixing the horses shoe before the knight is lost then the battle is lost and then the war is lost. Comparing the Cs with the Ds helps to put the cost into perspective and because the dangers are mostly in the future and difficult to estimate accurately, you can use this to your advantage and to create a sense of urgency.

So, there you have the way to use the terms of the Value Expression to play off one another and inspire you to create solid arguments and defences for your selling proposition.The only limit is your own imagination and ability to bring the customer along with you on the journey the value elements lay out for them.

The Value Conversation

So, you are probably asking yourself, where does all the information come from to fill in the four parts of the value expression? Well, let’s get that answered by looking at the Value conversation. We need to look at two factors that generate the data and stories you need to make your value equation. The first are the indicators that tell you what the problem is, the evidence at the crime scene, if you like, and the second are the consequences which tell you what it might be worth to solve it - the size of the prize.

So, to start with you ask the customer for a list of the issues they see and put them into order of priority according to the customer. Once the list is complete we look at indicators and consequences.

Indicators

You uncover indicators by asking the questions:

• How do you know this issue exists?

• What data shows the size of the problem and where it shows up?

• Are there specific metrics that will let us know the solution has worked and we have finished?

• What do they currently have too much or too little of and what shows the value of the difference?

What if there are no indicators to speak of?

Well, this is an opportunity for you - you can offer consultancy to discover them, preferably paid for by the customer. This potentially allows you develop the metrics that will show the success of your solution. If there are no indicators of a problem after all that then there is also no indication of a solution, so you will have a hard time using a value based sell. You will also leave yourself open to objections because without evidence of a problem, you are in the world of opinions. To influence opinions you need strong relationships and a lot of trust, and it is never as strong as a straightforward money value.

You should press the customer to answer these questions:

• How do they know there is a problem

• What specifically tells them this

• Where is it showing up in the organisation

• Who specifically is affected by it?

Consequences - the size of the prize for solving the problem

Always try to get numbers on your ABCD factors, stories with numbers are always much more powerful than anecdotal evidence. You need to find out what they measure and what they actually should be measuring (typically, customer related measures like profit per customer, cost to serve, repeat sales, on time in full delivery, customer lifetime value, etc.). Measures to do with customers and money are always the best measures.

Some customers use proxy measures because the real measure is difficult or expensive to monitor, for example, a lot of companies use surveys to gauge customer satisfaction. This tells them what their customers think of them, but it is actually a way to gauge customer loyalty, which is almost impossible to measure directly.

Consequences are revealed by these two questions:

• What is the value of the measure now?

• What does the customer want it to be and how much would that be worth in money terms?

If they cannot come up with a number then try asking them to put a value from one to ten on it. So how highly would they rate their export documentation performance now, they say 2 and you ask what do you need it to be, they say 10 but would settle for an 8. That is not ideal but at least you have a number to use that they gave you.

Be aware that when they say it is difficult to estimate this, there will be a definite number in the costs, the C in the equation, you provide to them for the solution. Then you are in the dangerous position of having provided a cost to solve a problem where the value is not known. You have filled in C in the value equation but left out A, so you are at a disadvantage.

If problem cannot be quantified then why would anyone pay money to have it solved?

You may need to rely on the fact that we value things based on perception not on reality. That’s why we have brands, stories and beliefs. Value is great when it is logically demonstrable but even better when it fits a story, and stories always win. Engineers want an engineering story, finance want a finance story, etc.

So, to summarise the value conversation - you get a list of issues, from them, check it is complete and then go into each item to find out how it is measured, what it is now and the value of improving it to the level they need.

What if you lay out your elements for your value equation and they don’t make a good enough case? Well, here are five helpful tricks we can take from psychology to shape our value expression.

Judging Risk - Increasing “D”

As a species, we cannot judge risk very well. If asked to choose between five options ranging from low risk and return to high risk and return, most people are happy to make their choice in relative terms.

Adjusting the “D” for danger factor in the value equation is the equivalent of doing this, it changes the context in which the decisions made. It effectively devalues the benefits of staying the same, the “B” factor and will encourage action to be taken. The element of the benefits of staying the same which is avoiding the risk of the project itself is not openly expressed, it is just included in “B”, whereas the “D” factor is an element in itself which emphasises its importance.

Order of Choices

Choose your comparators carefully when lining up against your competition. The order in which product or service attributes are considered matter, so make sure your client gets their list of what they are looking for lined up with the list of your product’s strongest characteristics. For example if I was looking to buy a car I would list price, fuel economy, performance, brand image and number of seats as my desired features, in that order. So, anyone trying to sell a Ferrari to me will have no chance. However, if I came into an inheritance of several million pounds, my list would change to brand image, performance, number of seats (fewer this time, though), fuel economy and price and I would be ringing up Ferrari. The things I am considering are exactly the same, but the order of my search defines my priorities and so leads me to completely different conclusions.

Think of yourself, for a minute, as a predator for your competition. When you consider your competition make sure you list your relative strengths first, so that their deficiencies are made clear.

Add Alchemy to your Product.

If you cannot make a pocket music player smaller then make the pocket larger. You can do this by redefining it as a ghetto blaster, or a shower player or the ideal fit for a handbag or rucksack.

Turn any lack of functionality into clarity of purpose and ease of maintenance - the way easy Jet made a virtue from being the most basic service. Something that does one thing does it better than a jack of all trades.

If you are new to the market then join a guild or professional association so that you can demonstrate trustworthiness. Offer a total audit trail, find a way to signal transparency and long term commitment. Being willing to fund upfront expense is a way to do this, so working closely with customers over time works, be careful about who you invest in, obviously.

Make Yourself the Default

If you position yourself in the market place, or even just the customer’s head, as the default option that everyone goes for, the standard against which everyone else is measured, then you have an advantage.

This is because, in the mind of the customer, it minimises the risk of getting the blame if something goes wrong. Taking the perceived default option has virtually no risk, if anything goes wrong there will be some fallout obviously, but none associated with the decision itself. Choosing your product or service has to be seen as the most logical choice, so that it is defensible.

Trade Offs

Think about tying a downside with an upside. Downsides make upsides more believable for a start, but we automatically trade off upsides and downsides and it alleviates the thinking burden of trying to justify choices or re-evaluating options. In this way you can use your A factors from the value expression and tie them into the C factors, the costs and any downsides associated with your solution.

Likewise, on the other side of the equation, You must provide reasons, countervailing upsides, or reframing for any negative aspects of your offer. So any B elements the customer keeps emphasising where your solution does not match up need to be paired up with a Advantage, in that way being written off in the customer’s mind. For example - the car doesn’t’t have leather seats like my current one? Yes, that is true, but it does have air conditioning to keep you cooler in the summer.

Another option is to offer something directly in return for any missing function or item - any B that doesn’t correspond directly to an advantage of your solution - for example, an improved guarantee, stay away from discounts, always add something extra, it is psychologically better to add things as it makes you look generous. If you can then give them an element of choice for the compensatory item you offer to make up for the functional lack.

Undiscovered Needs

We use “go-to” frames of reference for decision making; default, familiar mental models. We are machines for making assumptions because if we didn’t then the world would just be too complex for us to get anything done. If you want prospects to do something different, then you must help them break down their patterns and assumptions. We do this by changing the stories they are using to make choices.

So you need to gently probe to expose a gap or deficiency that your prospects didn’t know they had or amplify a challenge that they have undervalued. The fact or statistic alone will not create the insight, but giving it context in a way that defies your prospect’s repertoire of typical decision-making patterns will. For example the time value of money is often a good place to start. Getting paid earlier but slightly less is often ignored in favour of getting paid more but later, even though cash flow is a key factor in almost every business.

Your key question is: “ What are my prospects doing today that they don’t realise is potentially harmful, or not doing that is potentially valuable, to their critical business issues?” You need to find Indicators and show Consequences, as we have described in the value conversation section.

First help them “see” and “feel” the inconsistencies in their current thinking. Challenge the assumptions that drive their priorities by asking “What if “ questions. So, if they prioritise delivery speed as their number one customer offer then ask them what if they offered a slower service but it was cheaper or greener or related to a charity involvement?

Then show them how they can bring out the value by defining measurable quantities that can be materially affected by your solution. Show the size of the effect on the measurable and what that translates to in money terms. This must be done before they can even begin to imagine making a change, let alone care about whatever you are trying to sell them.

The majority of buyers who think they are almost done with their purchase decisions are not even ready for change, let alone ready to choose a specific company. Therefore you need patience, it will take longer than you expect and you need to be prepared to work on their needs and build them up into your value proposition.

Let’s look at how needs and value work.

Specifications are written based on the needs identified by procurement, end users and sometimes consultants. Procurement is based on “like for like” comparison – it minimises differentiation and, primarily, it seeks to achieve the procurement remit of reduced cost, reduced risk and reduced relationship with suppliers (which minimises time and cost for them).

Even when the operations people themselves create a description of what they think they need, they are very often limited by their own departmental boundaries. So a manufacturing team will give little consideration to the HR or finance benefits of a new factory clocking in system, but the automated production of timesheets has implications for both these departments.

Differentiation as a supplier is most powerful when it calls on unconsidered needs. You need to find needs that appeal beyond the core list of your target department within an organisation.

Some Examples are:

Product protection insurance - which is offered every time you buy a gadget, no one needs it because we have household insurance and the product is designed to fail after three years anyway, so what is the point? The point is that many companies make more from warranties than they do from the products themselves.

Carbon footprint, this is now an urgent consideration for everyone and companies in particular. Consumers make product choices based on green credentials. It is amazing, even now, how many companies see it as an extra to be ignored rather than a differentiator, but if you can change then you are ahead of the game already.

Product disposals / recycling - related to the green agenda but an entire industry in its own right. As companies become responsible for their own packaging and product recycling, this is an area of growing value and many companies have seized on it as a value differentiator.

If you want too differentiate yourself with your customers, re-empt the negotiation on price and increase the size of the deal then you need to be looking for undiscovered needs and now you know how.

Psychological Value Creation

Asymmetry of Risk Taking

When you focus on the size of the prize, you automatically lose sight of the risk - we always choose the big prize, it is why the Lottery sells so many tickets. Likewise, if you focus on the risk then the prize becomes irrelevant. This is why people who understand statistics do not do the lottery. This gives you a clear task - get customer to focus on the advantages of the new world and the risk of the old world.

One of the best ways to do this is to find undisclosed needs. These are the needs the client has not mentioned but you know are part of the value your solution brings - for example in outsourcing, you can focus them on staffing issues; if they outsource then they don’t need to worry about staff. That is the undisclosed need because staff are hard to manage, difficult to come by, high cost to train and motivate, difficult to scale up or down in times of market fluctuations. So focus on the risks of their current world of running their own staff and the advantages of the new world where it is all done for them.

Remember that we avoid risk when there is a possible gain involved and we embrace risk when we are trying to avoid losses. If I ask you to take £5 now or flip a coin where heads is 0 or tails gets you £10 - most people will take the £5 and not flip the coin. However if I reverse the proposition such that you can lose £5 now or flip a coin where heads you lose 0 and tails loses you £10, in that case, everyone will take the bet because they see at least there is a chance of not losing.

Relative Value

Example: An extra five minutes queuing at the counter for your morning coffee makes us tense, but an extra day on a thirty day lead time doesn’t feel like a big thing. So, it is better to make offers to your customer using on the items that are cheaper in the deal, so the relative value appears big, for example discounting the carpets and curtains whilst leaving the price of house as it is. If you reduced the price of the house by that same amount the buyer would not care.

Remember to choose your comparator well. The frame of reference you provide for the customer against which they look at your pricing is vital to maximising your price. Get creative, for example rather than just looking at other products similar to your own, choose to compare your service / product with investing a similar amount of money in a new car park, extra staff, the company advertising campaign, anything that you know is expensive, well funded and difficult to value absolutely. I once compared a new warehouse to the CEO buying a new yacht, how could he argue?

The Top Trumps Effect

Top trumps is a card game where you choose one statistic on your card to compare against your competitor’s card - say, you compare the top speed of the car on your card with theirs. Best number wins both cards.

We choose from the options that are in front of us. We will choose the best Bentley if we only shop in the Bentley showroom, if we shop on the internet then we will choose from fifty or more brands. Limit the choices your customer sees, by choosing what you compare your product to, and you can funnel them into the right decision.

The Attraction Effect

This is a curious effect, but really powerful. If you can position your customer’s options between a high quality, high price item and a low price, low quality item, then you can use this effect. Introduce a third option, say a slightly higher priced but lower quality car. Automatically, the customer will choose the original low price, low quality car. But, if instead, you introduce a lower quality, high priced car, they will choose the original high quality, high price car. The comparator makes all the difference.

Value of Timing

Sell me a cake when I am hungry and I will pay a premium, sell it to me when I am not and I probably will not even look t it. Perhaps restaurants should get you to choose your desert before the main course.

In business to business selling this means to always be aware of the customer’s tender cycle - when your customers current contracting arrangements are coming up for renewal. You need to be talking to them well in advance of the tender being published, ideally, you can either stop the tender going public or help them write it, so that your solution is naturally favoured because it was the template for the one described in the tender. Either way, make sure you sell when they are buying.

Comparators

Our brains do not make absolute judgements, every value we perceive is relative to the context around it. Hot water feels hotter if your hand is cold, the shock of the jump scare in the horror movie is increased by the silence that precedes it.

So, in sales, we compare what we are looking at or considering, such as price, service level or functionality with the last item we saw in that category. For example when we go to buy a pair of shoes we will compare the price with the last pair we bought. We will not compare with the average price of shoes or the last three pairs we bought, always the last relevant data point.

By choosing the parameters you want your customer to consider in making their choice and then further selecting the data against which they make the comparison, you can actually exert a lot of control about what gets chosen.

For example, my son needed a new laptop for school and I asked him to go choose one. He arrived back after an hour or so with a three thousand pound desktop model that he just had to have. He had gone straight to the gaming section of the website he was using and chosen the one with the largest numbers for speed, hard disk size, review stars. I explained that he could have that model the day I won the lottery, but in the meantime we needed a machine for school.

This time, I chose the website and told him to look at processor type, ram size and review stars because these are the numbers that will actually affect his experience of the laptop. We decided on a budget based on how much his bicycle cost, which he judged to be an item of equal utility to him. This time he made a choice that pleased both of us and he got the machine he wanted. He still hankered after the gaming machine until I pointed out that his gaming console had the same games on it, but a better controller. He immediately forgot about the PC, always choose your comparator with care and your customer will make the right decision.

Getting a customer to focus only on your solution and consider its strengths without reference to competitor offerings makes their life easier and your sale quicker. We will demonstrate this later in our consideration of value, which focuses entirely on your service in relation to the existing situation.

The main driving force within anyone with a decision to make is to make the right choice and to do it as easily as possible, with no possibility for regret.So as long as you can provide a satisfactory narrative for the customer to believe in that justifies their choice of your product / service that will get you a long way down the road.

Missing Comparators

I remember a very large, unhappy man glowering across a table at me and saying very intently, like a judge giving me a last chance to plead guilty, “I must admit, I am disappointed, the price is very expensive.” My stomach dropped and I felt my mind racing to find excuses for the terrible way I was treating this man.

I now know, he was using a negotiation tactic called “missing comparator” – where you state that you think something is too much, too little, too high, too low but never disclose what you are using as the basis of your judgement. You just say you are unhappy and the implication is that it is the other guy’s fault and the ball is in their court.

As Einstein once said, “Everything is relative” and so making any kind of comparison without making it clear what you are comparing against is not very honest. It happens all the time because we just don’t have time to get the full context of every single judgements of value or fairness we see. This does not mean that it is any less damaging to us just because it is a “necessary evil”.

I watch out for these missing reference points and omitted benchmarks all the time these days because I am continually amazed at how often they occur. In the retail market we see signs that say, “Reduced”, “Sale”, “10% off” and we assume that they are what they claim to be – reductions in the price of a sofa or whatever.

This is such a well recognised way of manipulating the public that we have laws to stop it. They force the shops to actually have a price in place for a set number of days before the new sale offer is made. Some companies get around this by offering the full priced item in their store in Antarctica for the bare minimum number of days before the “sale”. But, the point is that if there is a law to protect us from this, then you can be sure it works like a charm.

Why Context is important - it is what give your comparators their power.

You must control the context of the sale from the earliest interactions with your customer. You need to offer suitable comparators for your product, that means they are beneficial to you but must be defensible by logic. Typically human beings look at the lowest price product and the highest price product in any marketplace and go for the middle one.

So, do not be afraid if your customer starts comparing you to the top of the range competitor, you have an open door there to show how reasonable you are in your pricing. Likewise with the lowest price operator in the market you can emphasise the utility of the features you offer.

If you are the most expensive then it might be useful to create a “competitor” which is the possibility of terrible thing happening if one of your features is excluded and the worst happens. This will stimulate the “fear of missing out” type conversation and letting the risk sit with the customer. We covered this in the discussion of the value equation.

If you are the cheapest competitor in a market then a suitable approach is to downplay risk and focus on the benefits of getting the job done cost effectively. Note that we rarely use numbers to evaluate risk, we tend to use phrases, so for example we say, “It is likely to rain tomorrow”, rather than, “There is a twenty percent chance of rain tomorrow.” This is starting to become more common, but really people just want to know if they need an umbrella or not.

Cost, Budget and how they relate to value

You must determine your customer’s budget before you start talking about price and get them to agree a reasonable budget range. If you do not then you anchor the price within either an unknown range, if you just do not ask, or within an unrealistic range if they set it themselves without your input.

This discussion is difficult to bring up sometimes, but you must be brave and do it or else you will just lose a sale and a customer later on. Now, it is important to remember this is a discussion about what the solution is worth to the customer, not a negotiation on your price - that comes later in the sale. You just want to know what they are budgeting. If the person you are talking to cannot answer any of these questions then fond someone who can or else the sale is going nowhere. If they do not have money to spend, they cannot give it to you.

Ask, Have you set a budget for this project yet?

They say yes or no. Let’s assume Yes. The budget is either okay or it is too small. If it is okay, take the afternoon off and enjoy planning your sales approach, as covered in the Plan section.

If it is too small or if they answer no, or you tell me or the worst answer which is don’t worry, it won’t be a problem, then you answer with a clear statement of what they need to budget.

This statement is a range of costs, the top estimate and the bottom estimate and they can be as much as 50% different. The important thing is that they now have an anchor on the project. Never let them just quote the lower figure back to you, always correct them to the range. The range is to cover the fact that you have not scoped the full project yet, this is not a price, it is finding out if they can afford to shop in your showroom or not. It is as much a filtering out of time wasters as it is a mark in the sand for them in terms of buying their solution.

Let’s just look in a bit more detail at the response where they come back with a budget, but it is too small. You have given them your range and now you need to resolve, in the client’s mind, why they are not the same.

Ask, “How did you come you arrive at that number?”

They will have made one of two mistakes - either they have allocated budget based on their own financial state, what they can afford or they will have made an estimate about what they think the solution is worth to them.

You need to educate them on your product value as we have covered previously in this section. If they have anchored a price based on what a competitor has told them then you must get access to the quote and do a like for like comparison to show them where it is incorrect, and it will be incorrect.

Remember that we do not have the mental capability to make an absolute determination of value, as we have discussed before. When scientists gave subjects money to avoid getting electric shocks they found that the amount they were willing to give back in order to avoid the shocks was proportional to the amount they were given in the first place, not the pain of the shock itself. So if they were given two dollars at the start they would hand back, say one dollar to avoid the pain. If they were given five dollars they would hand back two dollars fifty to avoid the pain.

In our terms, the amount the subjects were given is the budget, if your customer reckons the budget should be half a million dollars then they will pay around that much and feel ripped off if it is more. If you get that amount out into open discussion and educate them that the true range is one million dollars then they will pay that much and feel proud of their project for being so expensive. Note that the price is an element of the value of any solution, more expensive always means higher quality in our minds and also indicate exclusivity. So, Bentley cars are expensive because the customer wants to be in an exclusive set of owners as much as it indicates a level of quality - a level of quality, by the way that the average customer has no real way of checking.

An easy to digest summary of all the content in the Problem section.

Welcome to the Plan section of the House of Sales!

In this video, you will learn about the importance of planning in sales and how it can lead to success.

We emphasize the need to plan to define what is expected and cope with the unexpected. You will learn how to answer important questions such as the most important actions needed to deliver the sale, how to approach an account, and how to manage and control the journey from opportunity to signed contract. You will also learn how to lead your customer along a path that changes their mind, changes their behavior, and gets you the sale.

Project skills are a key part of successful business-to-business sales, and you will learn how to stay in control of your sale by learning project management. You will also learn how to create an implementation story that takes away your customer's fear of the change process. By sketching out a plan, you will demonstrate to your customer that you are a leader, highly competent, and that the project is a risk-free enterprise.

A good plan is made up of events that get you from first contact to signed contract, and you will learn how to create your own plans for your accounts that get you the sale, the referral, and build your network. You will be able to manage any complex project using a simple, clear, and focused method that does away with all the fancy jargon that has grown up around project management. You will approach each new sales opportunity with confidence, knowing exactly what to do and when to do it, and you will retain full control of your pipeline from suspect to signed cheque.

You will stand out amongst your peers and your competition as a consummate professional who always knows where they are going. This video will change your approach to selling and your customers' lives, and I am excited to share this unique way of managing projects with you. Get ready to feel the success you desire and deserve!

A two minute high energy video to remind you that sales is all to do with action.

Opportunity (Project) Stability," we will discuss how to categorize customer requirements based on how well-defined they are. This is an important concept to understand because it will help you develop a plan of sales that is tailored to the specific needs of your customers.

We will start by using a two-by-two matrix to clarify the picture and identify four different types of B2B sales projects. This will help you understand the different types of customer situations you may encounter and how to approach them.

The first type of project is where the project is well understood, and you can predict with some certainty how your solution can affect the situation. However, you need to look out for unpredictable elements that cause volatility. The way to deal with these projects is to build enough slack into your solution and your implementation plan so that unexpected events can be comfortably accommodated.

The second type of project is where you can't predict what your solution might bring, and you and the customer don't really know a lot about the problem. This is an ambiguous situation, and in this case, where there are no real precedents for your solution, you need to build capacity in the budget and timescale to allow for experimentation and discovering the best way to proceed.

The third type of project is where the problem is not well understood, but you can predict with some certainty how your solution works. These are characterized as complex situations, and the approach to these is to apply the lessons learned from other customers in similar situations.

Finally, there is the situation when you can't predict the outcome of your solution, but fortunately, the customer does have a good grip on the problems. In this case, your biggest problem is convincing the customer that your solution is the right one for the job. The way to do this is to identify the trends within the customer organization that can be positively affected by your solution.

By understanding these different types of projects, you will be able to develop a plan of sales that is tailored to the specific needs of your customers. This framework provides a useful way of thinking about opportunities that you deal with, rather than just lumping them all into one pot marked "customer problems." It will also give you a way of thinking about problems that your customer almost certainly won't have and help you look smart and add value to their world just by the way you sell to them.

In conclusion, this video will help you understand how to categorize customer requirements based on how well-defined they are and how to approach different types of B2B sales projects. By using this framework, you will be able to develop a plan of sales that is tailored to the specific needs of your customers and add value to their world just by the way you sell to them.