Emergent Business Networks

Imagine the Press Conference (to focus your sales efforts) August 13, 2010

Early in a big complex sale, take time for a bit of daydreaming. Imagine the Press Conference where the CXO of the company you are selling to announces the project to the press.

Maybe you think that daydreaming sounds rather self-indulgent. Perhaps this is some new variant of the old “think positive” stuff?

Actually this is a very practical strategic selling tool.

Complex sales are, well, complex. Like the middle part of a chess game, it can make the brain hurt and it is really hard to see the wood for the trees. You are probably juggling internal politics, resource constraints, pressure from partners, competitive moves and customer politics – and that’s all before lunch!

You need something to keep you focused on what really matters. You need to know what is the one overriding motivation for your decision-maker. This is the story that your decision-maker will be announcing when the deal is done. She will present why her great initiative will have a big effect on one of the company’s key strategic objectives and why she was smart enough to select the one vendor that was ideal for the project.

Unless you know what this story is, you are shooting in the dark.

Even big, complex enterprise sales come down to the personal motivation of the ultimate decision-maker on your project. Customer politics can get in the way when the personal motivations of different managers are pulling in different directions. However if you know the personal motivation of the big boss (and if you are reasonably confident the big boss will stay in power long enough to get the deal signed) you cannot go far wrong. You can then focus on helping the boss align the pesky, politics-playing managers to the big objective.

To cut your way through the complexity of enterprise sales, you need to simplify. Select one person who is the key decision-maker. Understand what is important to that decision-maker. Select the one big reason why he/she wants to do this project. Select the one reason why he/she will announce your company as the right vendor.

There is tremendous power in keeping the focus to one. Find one decision-maker, one business driver and one vendor selection driver.  When you see multiple answers, keep drilling and imagine that press conference. The CEO will only have one minute to describe the vendor and why he/she chose you, so there cannot be lots of reasons.

Imagine yourself in his/her shoes. Remember when you have had to make an important decision and how you finally made up your mind. What you will usually find is that it was one simple reason and everything else was incidental.

Even more powerful is the realization that there is often one precise moment when you win or lose a deal, even if the whole sales cycle is 12 months or more. Everything before that is preparation to sell and everything after that is managing the process to closure. Think about decisions you have made and how you made them. There might have been lots of research to get you to a certain point and then a key point when in your mind you think “this is it”. Then you may still spend lots of checking to make sure you are doing the right thing, but you want the answer to be positive. You are looking for verification not problems.

In some sales, you may not be there when that key moment happens. This is not ideal, but it is the reality in many enterprise sales. At the crucial moment of decision, your decision-maker is probably sitting with the one manager he/she holds accountable for this decision.  Again, there is one key manager, although lots of other managers may be involved in the research and diligence stages.

Although you may not be there at that critical moment, you must have a very close relationship with the manager who is doing the briefing and you and he/she must have total alignment on the key objectives.

In long sales cycles, take time to imagine the press conference. Use this to get clarity on the “key ones” – one decision-maker, one business driver and one vendor selection driver.

Stomach knots, table banging and other good signs August 5, 2010

If you sell the big-ticket deals, you don’t need that many to make your numbers. These deals also take a long time to get to closure, almost never less than 3 months and often 12 months or more. By the time you get into the “closing zone” you and your teammates have expended lots of time and energy, your company is relying upon you to close the deal and you are starting to think about what you will do with the commission.

This is an exhilarating, scary and dangerous time. Exhilarating because you are close to a big “high five” success. Scary because if you lose at this point when you can almost taste the success, it will be a bitter disappointment. Dangerous because a smart buyer can easily exploit your intense need to close the deal and thus win major concessions.

Donald Trump (the real estate developer) in the Art of the Deal, talks about getting the other side to the stage where they really want the deal and think it is in the bag. Then he backs off and demands major concessions. Smart buyers everywhere have learnt some variation on these tactics.

So this is when you get a knot in the stomach and you might start to witness table banging and hear raised voices. All this unpleasant stuff is good news. Experienced deal closers recognize these as signs that a deal is closing. The absence of these signs is actually a cause for concern!

One consistent thread in all negotiations is that you must see some sign of real pain from the buyer in order to be confident that you are not leaving too much money on the table. Of course the buyer knows you will be looking for this and will be sending the signals that you have reached the limit. The skill comes in differentiating between fake pain as in “this is well above our budget and my boss will kill me if I agree” with the real thing. The buyer is also looking for the same signs from you.

Losing your temper is usually not good. It implies a lack of control and usually signals fear and weakness rather than strength. However sometimes it can be very effective. It worked for me once at a critical point in the middle of a complex contract negotiation. The buyer was a large bank, we were a small vendor and our competition was the obvious “you never got fired for buying XXX” in this market. Our sponsor got board approval to negotiate with us but only if he used a very tough lawyer, who had just published a booking on negotiating software contracts, to tie us up in knots and ensure no risk to the bank. After days of intense sessions arguing about tortuous legalese I had finally had enough. Without thinking I stood up, banged the table, raised my voice and made it clear I was pretty pissed. I am fairly big guy and at it’s most elemental this was physical intimidation. Things got a lot easier after that!

Negotiators use many tactics to simulate the table banging without killing the deal. You can use good cop/bad cop, or the “my intransigent boss will never agree” or you can use a stalking horse to lay down a negotiating line.

The tactics will depend upon the specifics of the sale, but the common thread is that when the stomach knot gets tight, you are probably in the closing zone and that is good. We were engineered for fight or flight for a reason!

Wait ‘till you hear the screams July 26, 2010

When I managed an enterprise software sales team, there was one guy who was consistently the best performer.  He was also, by all other visible metrics, the worst salesman. His presentations were rambling and verging on incoherent. His writing style would have given my English teacher apoplexy. He was consistently abrupt almost rude to all concerned. He came in late, left early and had long, expensive lunches.

I was really interested to find out what he did well. I do not believe in luck being a contributor on any consistent basis. So he must have been doing something really, really well because he was doing everything that was visible very badly.

I discovered that what he was doing very well was qualifying his prospects with great care and discipline. We all know that is what we should do, but very, very few sales people do it at all well. We think that sales is all about hard work, persistence, determination and all those other good Protestant work ethics. So we drive relentlessly on, calling that prospect for the umpteenth time.

This guy waited until he could see that the customer’s need was very real and urgent. He waited ‘till he could hear the screams. He then looked for something to indicate that we had an edge in the deal, some unfair advantage.

His laziness was a bit of an act. In reality he was a tireless networker. That is what all those long, expensive lunches were about. However he worked to create a sense of equality and respect with his customers. Sales people are usually too used to getting on their knees to that all-powerful buyer with the big budget. So the buyer does not respect the salesman and will ignore five of his calls in the certain knowledge that he will get another one.

Yes, it is a bit of a power game. This power game is easy to play if you work for the dominant player in the game. The power game is hardest to play when times are tough and you are behind in your revenue targets.

We were in that position when a small Hedge Fund came on the horizon. This was 1991 and Hedge Funds were not on our target list at that time, few people even knew what they were. The customer certainly seemed smaller than we were used to selling to. So the salesman told the prospect that we were not interested in their business. This put the prospect in a position of selling to us. “Sure we are small now, but we are growing fast and we need this system urgently and we have plenty of money for IT”. The screams were loud and clear and we closed the deal in record time and they became a good customer (and the Hedge Fund became one of the stars in this industry).

One way of checking for urgency is how much effort the prospect puts into the relationship. You need to see some equality of effort. If you call five times before the prospect returns your call that is not equality. If you send reams of information and give multiple presentations but the prospect won’t fill in a detailed requirements questionnaire, then that is not equality of effort. With every call you want the prospect to DO something. If this does not happen then the screams are not loud enough and you should move onto your next opportunity.

You have to cast a very wide net in order to qualify your prospects properly. Otherwise you will catch a couple of tiny fish in your net and mistake them for tuna! If you cast your net wide enough you will find deals where the customer’s need is urgent and your company has some specific edge in the deal.

The way to make sure you have a live one is to wait for the screams. Get your prospect doing some work before you get too excited.

image courtesy Flickr and Aldoaldoz