If Your Sales Proposition Isn’t Relevant Every Day, It’s Not Relevant at All

Let’s assume you’re a salesperson. You have a compelling proposition for your target customers, but there’s one small problem.

Your customers only make purchasing decisions periodically. This means that, most of the time, when you reach out to a prospective customer, they are not interested in having a conversation with you.

Before I share the solution to this problem, let’s first discuss the standard — but obviously wrong — approach.

The Wrong Solution

Conventional wisdom is that a salesperson, facing this dilemma, should first focus on building a relationship with potential customers so that when those folks do have a requirement, the salesperson — or their organization — will be top of mind.

The obvious flaw with this approach is the assumption that a prospective customer is interested in developing a relationship with a salesperson who has nothing of interest to sell! As anyone who has been on the receiving end of an irrelevant pitch from a salesperson exhibiting a tendency to be just a little too friendly will attest, this assumption is problematic.

A Kernel of Truth

However, this wrong solution does contain a kernel of truth.

The underlying idea is that if we can’t get the prospective customer to buy our product today, then perhaps we can get them to say yes to something else and, as a consequence, develop some kind of relationship.

This is actually a powerful idea.

It’s powerful enough that it deserves to be embraced as a guiding principle for those responsible for designing salespeople’s propositions: A sales proposition, to be relevant to a prospective customer, must be relevant every day of the week.

The problem with the standard solution is that a relationship with a salesperson is not a particularly compelling proposition. It also suffers from a lack of clarity around the meaning of the word “relationship”.

Relationships Ain’t Relationships

In business, there’s one special kind of relationship that’s very important to us. It’s what we call a commercial relationship. This is the kind of relationship that we should be prepared to invest in.

The other kind of relationship — a personal one — is not particularly relevant to business. It’s true that personal relationships can develop over time, typically as a consequence of successful commercial relationships; and it’s true that personal relationships have some benefit where preexisting commercial relationships are concerned.

But it is not clear that personal relationships are a first cause of commercial ones. In fact, most businesses today have accumulated a large volume of evidence that they are not!

Start Small. Grow Big!

Which brings us to our solution.

If you want to develop a commercial relationship with a potential customer, then come up with a proposition that is compelling today.

If your core product is not certain to be compelling today, then create an intermediate proposition that is.

Here are two ways to do that.

Let’s assume that you sell spiral staircases to builders — and that those builders only have an occasional requirement for your staircases.

One tactical approach might be to offer builders an incentive to let you quote on their next three jobs. You might agree to provide them with an attractive section of a staircase that they can exhibit in their display suite, in exchange for signing a memorandum of understanding that codifies the commitment they are making to you.

A more strategic approach would be to look for overlap between your special capabilities and your prospective customers’ day-do-day requirements. Perhaps you might discover that, while builders install spiral staircases occasionally, they install curved moldings on all the homes they build. If this were the case — and if building spiral staircases has caused you to invest in machinery and expertise relating to curved moldings — you might conclude that it makes sense to provide custom curved moldings to builders at a competitive price so as to establish a platform from which to sell spiral staircases. This is the Trojan Horse approach.

Either way, the result is the same. You are equipping your salespeople with a compelling proposition to which prospective customers can say yes every day of the week.