Challenge tradition. Quit selling. Begin helping. That's the advice given to salespeople by author Marc Miller in his book, A Seat at the Table: How Top Salespeople Connect and Drive Decisions at the Executive Level (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2009). Miller, CEO of Sogistics, a sales force transformation firm, believes that salespeople become successful by transforming themselves into businesspeople who sell.
Becoming a businessperson who sells means understanding the customer's strategies and connecting products and services to these strategies. By helping the customer achieve business results, a salesperson can earn a seat at the customer's table and become seen as an investment, not an expense.
A New Sales Environment
With technology and the Internet, buyers no longer depend on salespeople to make buying decisions about mature, core products or services. For this reason, the sales job no longer involves calling on mid-level or procurement managers to sell core products. Instead, the sales job requires calling on senior executives - not to sell a product initially - but to help prospective customers develop strategies that increase productivity and/or differentiate the customer from other businesses.
However, the skills to create demand for and sell complex solutions to executives are different from the skills of selling mature, core products and services to middle managers. To help salespeople develop these skills, A Seat at the Table presents a model for understanding corporate strategy and a process to use to conduct the first two meetings (discovery and general recommendations) with a potential customer.
Connecting to the Customer's Strategy
The first step for the salesperson is to understand the prospective customer's business strategy. To help salespeople understand the rules of corporate strategy, Miller developed the Master Strategic Plan Matrix based on two distinct schools of thought about strategy and decision-making:
- Blue Ocean and Red Ocean strategies: Red Ocean strategy supports a company's mature, competitive products, services, or markets that have provided past growth and profits but for which profitable growth is now difficult. Red Ocean strategies are mostly productivity strategies. Blue Ocean strategy supports new products, services, or markets that represent higher margins and faster growth, with the goal of significant differentiation from competitors.
- Important and urgent decisions: Important decisions are ones that an executive considers important in the long run, such as developing a new product or market. Urgent decisions require immediate attention.
Combining these schools of thought creates four areas into which a customer's strategies can fall:
- Blue Ocean strategies/important decisions: Innovative strategies that revolve around the future, such as new products, markets, and offerings that must be created to differentiate the business.
- Blue Ocean strategies/urgent decisions: Implementation of the important decisions made. It's urgent for the business to move quickly to capture new opportunities.
- Red Ocean strategies/urgent decisions: Optimization decisions for offerings and markets have matured and have competition. The focus is on maintaining business that brings in cash.
- Red Ocean strategies/important decisions: Outsourcing decisions to free up valuable people to focus on new differentiation strategies.
Discovery
Having a meaningful conversation with senior executives requires two things: understanding the company's strategy and having a questioning structure that the salesperson can use to connect quickly to that strategy. The salesperson's first call (discovery) on an executive uses this questioning structure to have a discussion to learn as much relevant information as possible about the prospect.
Miller goes into detail about a questioning structure called FOCAS: fact, objective, concern, anchor, and solution. The strategic intent of FOCAS is to uncover the strategies, objectives, and challenges of the customer. Miller then emphasizes the importance of the next step, which is usually setting up a second meeting, where the salesperson can present general recommendations.
General Recommendations
The purpose of the second meeting is for the salesperson to build a vision for change. The meeting has four goals:
- to create a business argument that change is in the customer's best interest,
- to encourage the customer to start seeing the salesperson as a consultant,
- to act as a cushion between the initial discovery meeting and the future specific proposal meeting, and
- to get conceptual agreement about the direction the customer wants to move.
Miller again goes into detail about how to conduct this meeting, at the end of which, the salesperson encourages the attendees to talk things through before making a decision. Miller emphasizes the importance of NOT trying to close the sale at this point. The salesperson and customer simply agree on a date in the near future where the customer can give a commitment or decision.
Miller writes that the discovery and general recommendations meetings are truly catalytic sales calls where the salesperson can gain buyer momentum. Customers want people who can help them differentiate and become more productive. Salespeople who embrace the mindset of helping and follow the discovery and general recommendations process can become seen by customers as part of their teams, earning a seat at the table and dramatically increasing sales.
Carol Wiley - Carol Wiley is a technical writer turned licensed massage therapist turned freelance writer. Visit her freelance writing site or Massage ...
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