As we develop our understanding of all the things that are going to have to happen in our customer’s buying process, we can start to put together a bulletproof sales campaign. We turn all the events and activities we have identified into an overall game plan, which we and our prospective customer will work through together. I recommend managing every qualified sales campaign just like you would manage a project, complete with milestones and assigned resources from both our company and our prospect’s company. Shows the activities of the sample buying process we reverse-engineered earlier in this chapter in project form.
You could call this a project plan, a sales plan, a closing plan, or whatever strikes your fancy. I like to call it a ‘Process of Mutual Discovery.’ The name itself helps remind me, and my customer, that we are constantly in discovery mode every step of the way. Customers seem to like the name, because it emphasizes the fact that the plan is a way for us to learn about them, and for them to learn about us, to further explore whether we can accomplish our mutual objective.
For some readers, this will not be a brand-new idea, but I want to emphasize the most important aspect of this specific approach. Please take one more look at the Process of Mutual Discovery. Notice that this is not a plan of how to get to point ‘B,’ which ends when we receive a signed contract. This plan defines all of the things that have to happen to get your customer all the way to point ‘C.’ This is vital.
Why would a customer have any interest in your plan to get the deal closed? Wouldn’t that kind of be a slap in the face? That’s not what they care about. They want business results. Building and sharing your plan to help them get from where they are right now to where they ultimately want to be communicates that you have the right shared interests and that you intend to be around after the ink dries on the contract. Your client will notice the difference, and they will perceive you in a very different light than your competitor who is focused only on closing the deal.
I share my Process of Mutual Discovery with my client whenever I feel the time is right. We certainly don’t want to present the idea before we’ve earned a certain level of trust. It takes a little time to earn the right to propose a joint plan like this. We need to have found someone who knows the goal or objective they are trying to accomplish, why they want to accomplish it, and how they can afford the investment of both time and money resources to get there. Ideally, this person would be an executive with substantial authority to allocate both money and people resources, but in a bottom-up campaign, you may not have that early on. Find somebody who stands to gain something important if the project is successful and who is willing to fight for what they want. Then present your plan as a tool to help them make the internal sale they will have to make.
There are several things that make this approach to managing a sales campaign very effective:
1. It Helps Keep Us on Track
As you meet more of the decision makers and influencers, and learn more about the hurdles you’re going to have to help your client get over, the sheer overload of information can sometimes become a blur. Map- ping out the process enables us to sort things out, think about what we are doing, and do a better job of selling with specific intent.
2. It Forces Us to Look Ahead
It’s very easy to get caught up in all the meetings, e-mails, and phone calls involved in a sales campaign. It’s even worse when you are trying to manage three, or five, or eight deals at a time. Having a codified plan that defines what we need to do, and what our client needs to do, helps us both to stay focused on the bigger picture of the overall campaign, rather than getting mired down in a competitive ‘feature and function’ battle.
3. It Helps Us to Stay Aligned with Our Buyer
If we use this plan as a dynamic, living document that changes as we go along based on new information and understanding of what our client is doing, and planning to do next, it helps us keep in step with our buyer throughout the process.
4. It’s a Tremendous Qualification Tool
It has been my experience that you get one of three reactions when you share your plan with the client: (1) they think it is a great idea, they take part ownership of it, and they adopt it for their internal selling purposes, (2) they are somewhat ‘ho-hum’ and indifferent, or (3) they want nothing to do with it. Their reaction can tell us a lot about where we stand, and about where they stand in terms of their own internal buying process.
In a complex buying decision, especially a bottom-up initiative, there will probably be more internal selling going on than external selling. All our actions as a vendor will be a small part of everything that has to happen in order for a project to be approved, staffed, and funded.
Normally about a third of my prospects love the idea of a documented Selection and Buying Process. They take full or partial owner- ship of the plan. They help to make sure it includes all the hurdles we will be helping them to clear, and that all the right people attend the meetings, and so on. Another third of them aren’t necessarily impressed, but if you ask them for information to build the plan, they will provide you with some of it. The final third hand it back, change the subject, or otherwise communicate, ‘We are not doing that.’
Their reaction to your plan is one of the best ways I know to find out which clients want our help to make a great buying decision and reach point ‘C.’ Of course, just because they don’t turn a backflip when you show it to them doesn’t mean it won’t help later. Just keep using the plan for your own benefit. You can show it to some of the other play- ers in the buying decision later on. Many of those clients who are not overly impressed initially come around later, after they’ve met with some of your competitors who seem to be focused more on making a sale than helping the customer reach their goals.
5. It Helps to Justify Access to the Right Executives
Notice that in the column labeled ‘Client personnel’ of the process shown, we specify who needs to be involved in these various activities and events. To begin with, you may not even have the names of the people in these various roles. That’s fine. Just put the title or the role in for a place holder.
This way of requesting executive access is remarkably effective. I have never found a better way to gain access to the ‘right’ people. It is really quite surprising how much less resistance you will encounter. Think about the difference here. In one scenario you hand your customer a piece of paper that defines a certain event, shows where that event fits in the overall scheme of things, spells out the purpose of the event, and lists the personnel who should be in attendance. In another scenario you ask, ‘Would you please set up a meeting with your CFO.’ In the former, it only makes sense that the CFO should be there. In the latter, it seems like you are just trying to go over their head. You may not be able to appreciate how effective this is until you try it yourself, but I’ll share one of many examples of how this has worked for me.
I met a woman at a tradeshow who was the vice president of information systems (IS) for a midsize construction company in New York City. She had been hired by the president and owner of the company for the express purpose of buying and implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
At first she was very resistant to any request for access to those who would be involved in the final decision. It was one of those, ‘Just send me your questions via e-mail, and I will get the answers and e-mail them back to you,’ routines. I couldn’t blame her. She started with fourteen potential vendors, and she was just trying to do her job without tying up everyone’s time answering questions from vendors.
After a couple of meetings, I showed her the skeleton of a plan I had put together. It was very incomplete at that point, but she saw the value right away. It was as if a lightbulb went on for her. She helped me figure out the additional hurdles we needed to clear. She took joint ownership of the plan and began arranging meetings with all the right decision makers that needed to be involved. It was an amazing change to observe.
She told me later on, ‘You know, we had no intention of going with your company when we started out. Your system seemed too big, cumbersome, and expensive for us. But when you showed up with your process, it seemed to make so much sense. You helped us define exactly what issues we were trying to solve. From there you quickly determined what pieces of your overall solution we should spend our time looking at. You helped me think about a lot of the decisions we would be faced with that had nothing at all to do with the solution, but with resource allocation, funding, and the strategic direction of the company. Most of all, you made my job easier because after we mapped out the steps along the way, and who needed to be involved in each step, I just printed out a bunch of copies and went around from office to office saying, ‘I need you on this day. I need you on that day.’ You made it very easy to buy from you.’
Now I must admit, not every client I have shared this process with has responded with this level of enthusiasm. For many of my customers, it simply helped them to better clarify and document the plans they already had. Other customers have used it in a more limited fashion, to organize meetings or plan resources. And some just yawned and said, ‘Thank you for your time.’ But if this plan served no other purpose than to justify, or simply provide a good reason for, gaining access to key decision makers, it would be well worth the effort.
6. Finalizing the Agreement Is Just One Step Along the Way
Because the process that we use includes activities and events both before and after point ‘B,’ finalizing the agreement is just one step along the way. When your customer understands that you’re ‘in it with them’ all the way to ‘C,’ closing the deal is not such a scary event. Yes, it’s important, and there will most likely be negotiation and certain objections that arise when it comes time for them to commit, but your focus-and your customer’s focus-will be on getting the agreement worked out so you can move forward together. The act of closing will carry a totally different dynamic.
This idea, just like every other tool or technique, doesn’t work every time. But when it works, this is how it works. Your own results will impress you more than any success story I can tell. But please remember, a good two-thirds of the customers who you share this with probably won’t jump all over it, but for the one-third that do, your chances of winning that business will increase exponentially. As one of my workshop attendees pointed out, ‘By developing and providing this kind of process, we’re not only providing ‘B,’ we are providing the arrows (the process) that connect ‘A’ to ‘B,’ and ‘B’ to ‘C.’ Give that man a star!