Learning a new way

I was in my mid twenties when I “learned to sell”. I had left school at 16, flitted from job to job with no attempt at building anything of substance and it took me several years to eventually wake up to the need to grow up and cultivate a career. I leaned on nepotism and asked my father to get me an interview with the local Xerox office in Aberdeen, for whom he was a senior engineer. I was given the most fleeting of interviews before being handed the keys to my company Renault Laguna and told what my patch was. My sales journey had begun in earnest.

One of the first things a new Xerox sales rep was tasked with was surviving training at Wokefield Park near Reading. This short period of brainwashing was designed to remove any bad habits you had previously employed and turn you into a “Xeroid”. Team bonding was highly encouraged, which generally involved drinking in the bar until the sun came up and still being bright and bushy tailed for the training day ahead. Feedback we received was that it was generally accepted that the Scottish folk excelled in this section of the training……

The training was all about structure. Cold calling had a structure, as had first meetings, as had negotiations, close meetings, etc. Everything was “when you say this, they will say that, so you then say this”. It was an eye opener, I can tell you. One of the keystones of the whole sales cycle was when to introduce price. It went a bit like this:

1.      Establish discontent with the client’s present supplier or equipment

2.      Empathise with their discontent and provoke them into saying it angers or annoys them

3.      Ask what effect this poor performance has on their business

4.      Introduce the Xerox solution and explain why it would solve each area of concern

5.      Ask what effect they think this new glorious plan will have on their business

6.      And all these features, advantages and benefits for only ￡x

And this worked. All the time. It worked for years and in some cases, iterations of the same process still work now, because it’s simple and when you are in one of these conversations, it all makes perfect sense. However, to truly make this structure work, there’s an investment of time and money into the present situation and proposed solution. Is this an investment we can still afford to make?

Should we make a change?

My present role is to help businesses grow through the use of IT. We provide hardware, software, support, comms, telephony, etc. Very few situations we enter into are as simple as “my copier keeps jamming”. To be able to provide a solution to a prospective client’s IT related woes, we have to spend a day, maybe two or three, visiting their premises, installing monitoring software, liaising with suppliers, producing proposals, etc. This costs money. Lots of it. And not many prospective clients are keen to part with their cash for us to compile a proposal asking for even more of that cash! So we do all this costly work and at the end of the ten page proposal, we produce the cost from our top hat and the client says “but that’s three times more than I’m paying now”……

One thing that appears to be coming more prevalent in this industry is quoting costs up front, before any investigatory work takes place. I pretty much know how much a monthly contract is going to be if I know how many servers and desktops we will be asked to support and this now leads to a structure like:

1.      Establish the equipment that needs looked after

2.      Quote an approx. price and ask if this is within budget

3.      If not, end the meeting and don’t waste anyone’s time. If so, continue to investigate

After a couple of decades (I know, I look so young, right?!?!) of doing things the Xerox way, I’m now using the price up front method more and more. Whilst I’m doing less proposals, I’m closing the same amount of business, maybe a touch more. I initially found the up front pricing strategy cold and abrupt, but now believe it to be respectful. If I sit in hours of meetings with a prospective client and spend even more hours producing a proposal to just be told, “Oh, you are much more expensive than I can afford”, I’ve wasted my time, my engineers time and the prospect’s time. Nobody wins. This new way means that this can’t happen and still allows us to part with people who don’t wish to spend what we’d like, as friends.

I’ve read a lot recently that if you have a robust social media strategy, strong marketing, new content and a fantastic website, you don’t need sales people anymore. I obviously disagree with that, but would say you need sales people who can flex their style dependant on the situation and no longer stick to one overall structure. There is no Business to Business or Business to Consumer, but there is Human to Human and finding the right way to communicate is key to success.

I’d be very keen to hear feedback from anyone who has recently struck upon a new way to communicate with their clients, so please don’t hesitate to comment. Also, if anyone else speaks about price up front, I’d be delighted to hear about successes and challenges they’ve had doing this. And finally, I and the Shackleton Technologies team are always happy to hear from anyone looking for IT advice. Feel free to ask for the price up front or at the end!