The thin end of the wedge

If you've ever split wood for firewood, you've probably used a splitting wedge or a maul. It's been years for me! - I've been living in cities buying my firewood in neatly packed little bags for a long time, but I still remember splitting firewood with a wedge, and I still remember that intuitively we knew to put the thin end of the wedge into the log if we expected it to split. This is why I'm always surprised at companies and salespeople who want to start with the thick end of the wedge with a new customer. Is it possible to split the log by driving the thick end of the wedge into the log? Sure it's possible but it's going to take an immense amount of effort and force and the results are probably going to be less than satisfactory in the unlikely event that you get the split to happen. It's really the same in Sales: Some call the strategy I'm going to describe 'Land and Expand' - I actually like the 'Thin end of the wedge' because it creates an intuitive mental picture of what you are trying to do. (That is if you've ever tried to split wood!)

So, sometimes we are lucky in sales, and giant, previously unknown opportunity lands in our lap, I wouldn't suggest turning these away - but I certainly wouldn't recommend building a career on hoping for the next 'BlueBird' deal. What I recommended is once again working on things for the long term using a defined strategy that you know has been successful in the past and will likely continue to be successful in the future. If you've been reading my articles for some time, you know by now that I believe in building trust with a customer toward the ultimate goal of becoming a trusted advisor who is regularly called on for advice. My 'thin end of the wedge' advice is nothing more than an early step in that trust-building process. Instead of going after being a customers' global standard for your product category in the first meeting, I suggest finding some small, safe wins that you know will be successful in order to build trust and credibility - and frankly to get started sooner on that long-term relationship!

There are multiple benefits to the 'Thin End of the Wedge' approach:

• It's lower risk than going for everything in the first deal.
• You build trust and credibility quickly - because the smaller projects can be deployed and evaluated more quickly.
• With the quicker trust build, you can start to ask for additional opportunities of larger and larger scope.
• Internal Referrals are another huge benefit - When you've had success in one location - it's much easier to get introduced to other locations (Cells, Lines, Plants, Divisions, Groups, or sister companies)
• External Referrals - Many companies will trust your experience with customers who are most like them - so taking this deeper dive into other similar companies will be more effective than general market targeting. ...and a happy customer is likely to assist with referrals.
• You learn faster and with lower risk. By keeping the projects and deals smaller to start with - you get to verify the Product-Market fit of your solution, faster and more efficiently and feedback on the customer needs to your own development team more quickly. This can be a virtuous circle leading to better and better product market fit and more growth in the targeted space.

So, it's obvious that the first step to being successful with the "thin edge of the wedge" approach is in setting your target deal size to a scale that is easily manageable - you don't want to intentionally go after the 1000 unit opportunities at the first release of your product. Target the smaller installations, even in those accounts that you know have a large demand capability. The next steps are similar and in some ways are responsibilities that lie across Sales, Marketing, and other departments within your organization:

• Make these transactions as 'frictionless' as possible. Several years ago I saw Robert Stephens (founder of Geek Squad) speak about removing friction is critical for any business to be successful - I think it's especially important with these early Project deals - Your organization HAS to make it easy for the customer to buy and deploy your solution! - There is no other option in today's competitive world. If your project evaluation phase stretches into days - either you are making things too complicated - or they really are and your solution isn't a good choice for this strategy.
• Fast ROI - or at least a quick time to deploy and see the results that will lead to the eventual ROI. If it takes months or years for your customer to see and recognize the benefits of your solution(s) --- You will be waiting months or years until the customer is ready to help you drive the rest of the wedge in (expand to other opportunities, either internally or externally) - and again, it means your solution is probably not a good one for this approach. You ideally want a solution that delivers visible results in days or weeks. This doesn't mean that you need to have Payback in this time frame, only that the customer can see that the Payback and ROI are going to be real and ideally are going to exceed your promises. (Under promise / Over deliver is ALWAYS a best practice)
• Delight the customer - Similar to removing the friction in the transaction above - this 'thin end of the wedge' process works best when customers are truly happy with the solution that has been delivered - Delighted in fact. If you make the customer feel like they got more than you promised or they expected throughout their experience: From initial conversations, right through to delivery and implementation - they are far more likely to invite you back and make both the internal and external referrals that I discuss above. This is a high standard that is not always easy to achieve, but it's a critical component of a company culture if you want to build long-term relationships with repeating and expanding customer value. Ask yourself - Does everyone at our company work to exceed customer expectations with every interaction? If not, work on this culture - and fast!

Many people on my teams have heard me say 'Great, that's the thin end of the wedge' on small wins and big targets in the past - Hopefully, there was always a clear understanding of the meaning and the next steps in the approach, and if not hopefully this article makes my intent clearer. I tried using several AI imaging tools to get myself a royalty-free image of a Splitting wedge in a log - and found that none of them understood what I'm talking about - so, I borrowed one from the website of Sporty's tool shop - I hope they don't mind - I'll replace it if they ask!