Earning the right to show your differentiating commercial value!

Securing a call with your prospect is one of the most difficult activities to perform in sales today. ?

72% of buyers want a rep free purchase experience (Gartner), why? …because they don’t want to be sold to. ?A sales person with an agenda to sell is an off-putting experience.?It’s ironic that sales people are responsible for the biggest crisis the B2B sales and marketing industry has ever seen.?Which has influenced buyer behaviour so much in the last decade that buyers ignore cold calls, don’t respond to emails and go out of their way to avoid anyone that looks or smells like a sales person. ?It reminds me of the great horse manure crisis of the late 1800’s, where large cities were drowning in horse manure.?

There were 11,000 Hansom Cabs (a carriage) on the street of London alone, there were also several thousand horse-drawn buses each needing 12 horses, all-told there were a staggering 50,000 horses on the streets of London each producing around 10kg of crap each day.?That’s 500 tons per day! ?The Times wrote an article that explained how every single street in London would be buried under 9 feet of horse crap within the next 50 years if something wasn’t done today.?

The same can be said for B2B sales.?Thirteen years ago, The Corporate Executive Board first uncovered the change in buyer behaviour, how buyers were using the internet to do their research and come up with a short list of suppliers before a sales person had been called in.?Today, new research from Forrester has found the purchase decision to be almost 90% concluded by the time a buyer reaches out to a supplier.?No longer do buyers trust vendor website or blog insight, they would rather choose trusted communities, friends and colleagues or a free trial to decide for themselves rather than believe what a supplier says. ?

All businesses are struggling to generate quality pipeline.?Not because of the micro-economic challenge we are facing, it’s because of the macro problem of the growing B2B sales crisis and the change in buyer behaviour.?Old techniques no longer work so there’s no point cranking the handle harder or trying new things, new strategies within the same system when the system itself is broken. ?

Henry Ford designed the Model T, an affordable, high quality and easy to handle vehicle that cost just $260 (reasonable price at the time), and it rolled off the production line in 1908.?Solving the horse manure problem for many at that time.?

The traditional sales funnel is broken.?

We need a different approach that revolutionises the way in which we develop new pipeline.?One that empowers people to develop their personal brands, teach them how to create compelling and stand out content that aligns to their values, the things that drives them and purposefully connect with their target audience as the human, authentic and helpful individual they are.?This is what businesses need to tap into today to survive and thrive.?

When less than 5% of any given territory is in-market for what you sell and less than 1% knows who you are, what chance do you have of being in the conversation when there’s a need or budget. ?The competitive advantage for businesses today is to build relationships with the 99% of buyers who don’t yet know you, so when they have budget or a need arises.

We are seeing the commercial impact of adopting this new approach delivering between a 3% to 16% meeting acceptance rate from those asked, which if your targeting is purposeful should be almost everyone targeted.?It doesn’t sound like much but consider the relationship building aspects, with one targeted conversation leading to another… ?If you had 100 people in your team all with a network of 1,000 contacts and each were growing their network by 30% each quarter, each person could generate between 60 to 320 new conversations per year.??Now think about your focus account strategy, how deep and wide could you build rapport and trust across your target accounts??…or with a volume based sales approach, how many new companies could you get in front of?

Securing the meeting is one thing, exchanging enough value to agree next steps is another!

Securing a meeting is one thing, but agreeing a next step is based on establishing a value exchange strong enough for the recipient to agree to spend more time exploring how you can help them. ?

The most experienced reps will handle this discussion with ease, establishing credibility quickly and creating a value exchange based on directional questioning that blends qualification with relevant insight, making the recipient feel like they can help them.?This typically results in the rep knowing if this is an opportunity worth spending time on and agreeing next steps. ?

For most reps this is very hard to do.?I’ve found the following building blocks provide you with the knowledge needed to construct a discussion that leads to a positive next step for both parties. ?

1. Value story - a story that touches on the industry problem you know they face, and the effect this has on business performance, talking to both the left and right sides of the brain, empathising with your audience the impact this has on them.?It can also be used as a great qualification tool to qualify the buyer type as much as how much of a pain it is for the business to solve, by asking a question like “what’s the impact on you if this problem isn’t resolved within the next 6 months?”?Or “who else does this impact and how can they support you in solving this issue?”
2. Success stories - have one or two relevant success stories you can weave into the conversation for credibility and to build confidence with your audience that you can solve problems similar to theirs.?
3. Commercial insight - identify i) what makes you uniquely different, ii) of those unique strengths, which of those your customer?under values, that you wish they would value. iii) what is it your customer fails to understand about their business that leads them to under value those unique strengths.?What is their mental model that leads them to think those services aren’t worth paying for. iv) therefore identifying what you have to teach our customer about their business in order to get them to value those capabilities more than they do now.??
4. Directional questioning - threading your discussion with a series of questions to help direct the discussion, uncovering pain, qualifying who’s affected the most and the importance of solving it.?I find by having 4 or 5 directional questions prepared ahead of time provides you with where you want the conversation to end up.?Preparing anyone else accompanying you in advance will avoid them asking disruptive questions that take the recipients mind away from the intended task.?Uncovering and feeling pain and helping to prioritise where to focus.
5. Asking for the next step - so often the next step is missed or worse, the buyer takes you down a path where positioning differentiating commercial value is impossible to demonstrate.?If the previous 4 steps have been done effectively then the best question to ask, assuming you know where you want to take the process, is:?“if what we’re discussing sounds interesting, there’s a few steps we can take which will allow me to provide you with the information you need to compare us to your alternative options and make an informed decision about whether we are the best option for you.”?”…so many companies have wasted money on things without knowing if it will really work, this approach mitigates the risk and provides you with the insight you need to make a wise and informed choice.”

And now you’re on the road to helping your buyer clarify the pain that needs solving, the importance of solving it, defining the purchase criteria that they can then use to build consensus with their peers for support to realise value.?

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