Category: Strategy

Wednesday, 9.09pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Consultative selling is about making presentations – in person, in print, over the phone – in any other media you can think of.

You will need to try and get your point across.

More importantly, you will need to listen – and that’s something we can find hard to do.

Take the way many sales presentations are structured, for example.

You know everything about your company. So, it makes sense to you to start there. The marketing team is going to pull some stuff together about how big you are, what kind of clients you have, what awards you’ve won and whatever else you can come up with.

When you meet someone for an hour’s meeting, you’ll typically have an agenda that starts with introductions. Then you have a little presentation, where you go through the stuff about you. Then you give the other side a chance to talk a little about them.

By this time, forty minutes out of your allotted 60 minutes and you’re really nowhere. Perhaps you can feel good that you took the time to listen to them and get your message across.

In my experience, however, the other side spent the first bit simply staring at you glassy eyed and wondering whether they turned the lights off at home and the emails they forgot to send and just have to get round to before lunch.

During their bit of the session, they ran through a vague history of where they are and threw out some bits that they thought might fit with what you do.

The chances are, however, anything they talk about they already know how to do. That’s why they have enough to talk about. If they don’t know how to do it, then they’ll probably say that instead.

All that bland, corporate stuff is simply what John McPhee calls throat clearing. It’s all the stuff that is just in the way, the debris blocking your way to the real issue.

Think for a second about the purpose of all that introductory stuff you went through. The reason for putting it in there was to show you are good – to credentialize you.

But… the prospect hasn’t thought of buying from you at this point. They don’t know if you can help them in the first place. Why would they think about engaging you?

The thing to realise is that the point at which people check you out is after they come up with the idea that they need what you might be selling in the first place.

Think of the way you go about your life. Do you spend your time checking the history of all the things around you? Or do you first make a decision that you need something – a new car, toothpaste, a holiday – and then start looking into it in more detail?

The point about consultative sales is that it usually involves a problem that needs solving. The special thing about this problem is that it’s something the client can’t do themselves – either they don’t have the skills or know what needs to be done but don’t have the resources.

You’re either providing knowledge – the experience to help fix things – or a pair of hands to help out.

So, in your 60 minutes with your prospect, what you’ve got to do is spend as much time as possible on the issue. Get started there as soon as possible.

For many “trained” salespeople this can sound like heresy. What about all the rapport building you should be doing? Shouldn’t you be looking around the prospect’s office and trying to work out what hobbies they have? What teams they support?

Shouldn’t you be trying to become their friend at the start?

I think the answer is no. Perhaps it is in some cases – if you’re the kind of person that has the ability to have people give you business because they’re your friend.

In those cases, I’d suggest that the friend really has a conflict of interest. They shouldn’t be having that discussion with you at all. And you shouldn’t be having it with them. You just can’t provide honest, objective advice if things get that personal.

The way you become friends, in my view, is if you work together over time and build a relationship of trust based on delivering on your promises. That’s a more solid foundation for a long-term relationship.

Anyway… I digress.

The point is that you must get to the point. Quickly.

The most successful sales presentations I’ve seen are where the client has a problem and asks you to talk to them about it. You can leave all the guff about introductions and credentialization for later. At that point, you have them interested.

All you need to do is start talking about the issue. The problem. What their situation is, the shape and size and scope of the problem they’re facing, what it means for them and what approach you’ll take to solve it.

If your discussion is about a specific issue, in that form, then the follow on takes care of itself. Your proposal will simply put down in writing what you said you’ll do. You’ll get to a place where you have one discussion which leads to one proposal which leads to one sale.

As I write this, I’m thinking about a tender I’m working on. I’m trying to explain a technical approach to trading – I harp on about the history of this approach, how it has worked, how clever it is. Then I write about how I’m approaching the prospect’s situation and how we would advise them.

Tomorrow, I’m going to turn it around. I’m going to write first about them and what I’m suggesting they should do. Then, I’ll go back to why I’m saying that, why we developed our approach and why it works.

Then, I know that in the first few paragraphs I’ll be talking about their problem and getting across the main message – which is what I’ll do for them – and leaving the rest of it for them to absorb later.

In newspaper speak – what I’ve done in my current draft is bury the lead.

Instead, what you and I need to do to get the discussion going with maximum effect is to get to the point.

In the first paragraph.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

As a reminder, this is the seventh post in a series that I’m planning on eventually collecting into a book on Consultative Selling. If you are reading this and are interested in this topic, please let me have any feedback, good or bad, so I can make this as useful and easy to read for you as possible.

Sunday, 9.35pm.

Sheffield, U.K.

When you think of successful people do you also think that the way they got successful was by taking risks?

Take your prospect, for example. That’s a person with a senior role in a large organisation, the kind of organisation that can afford to pay for your services.

They didn’t get there overnight. To be in a position where they can approve tens of thousands to pay for your time probably took a few years. Several years. Years where they worked carefully and conscientiously and were promoted for successes.

Do you think any of those involved taking a risk?

In a small number of cases the answer may be yes. It’s hard to think what the circumstances might be though.

In most cases, they got to where they were by not screwing up – or at least by not being seen to screw up. They got there by being risk-averse.

And that’s an important lesson for us to remember when trying to persuade someone to work with us.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that because we have a wonderful new product, everyone we talk to will think the same way.

Then, when we find they don’t, it’s just as easy to think what we have is rubbish and will never get anywhere in the market.

Both these are irrelevant ways of thinking. It really doesn’t matter what we think about our product. It also doesn’t really matter what most people think about it.

The only opinion that really matters is that of the person in a position to pay money for it.

And it’s a good idea to start imagining that person as standing in front of a wall. A wall built up of all their experiences, their preconceptions, their values. The things that make them think the way they do.

Let’s take an example. If you supply a service to the public sector, the chances are that there is government guidance out there that tells public sector bodies the best way to buy services.

What do you think are the chances that any one of those bodies follows a different way to the approved one?

Slim. If you try and persuade one of them to do things differently – to select you without going through a procurement exercise, for example – they’ll struggle with the idea.

If you know them well and they really want to work with you, then they’ll game the system – create a tender that only you can win.

In many cases, however, you’re dealing with someone that has a particular way of working and what you do needs to fit into that world, to be compatible. If it’s not, you’ll struggle from the start.

In other words, you’re not going to persuade anyone to take a risk. If your selling process is based on that you will fail.

What will make your prospect take action is to structure your pitch so that you avoid risk or eliminate it. That’s really what drives people.

It’s well known that most people look at wins and losses differently. You’d probably be much more upset at losing $1,000 than happy at winning the same amount.

Try this with your young kids. Tell them if they put their dishes in the sink, they’ll get a dollar. See how eager they are to take you up on the offer.

Then, give them a dollar. Then tell them that if they don’t put their dishes in the sink, they’ll need to give you back the dollar. See how they react this time.

If they’re like most kids, they’ll be less excited about earning something than losing something they already have. That’s why discipline for children often involves taking something away from them – that makes them much more likely to stop and listen to you.

So, what does this have to do with your prospect?

Well, to get them to take action, first you need to try and tear down as much of that wall as possible. That means making it safer for them to work with you – guarantees, warranties, try before you buy options.

The less risk they have, the more likely it is that they will consider what you’re offering.

Then, you need to go one step further. You need to frame your product in terms of what they will lose by not taking it, not what they will win.

For example, you could say that your product will save them $10,000. That’s what they could win. You could also mention that their competitor already has saved this $10,000 and what that means it that your prospect’s prices are going to be less competitive as a result. That’s what they could lose.

The way in which you put your point across will make the difference between them taking action or not.

Wherever possible, try and help them avoid losing something they have, and you might be surprised by how positive they are about working with you.

Cheers,

As a reminder, this is the sixth post in a series that I’m planning on eventually collecting into a book on Consultative Selling. If you are reading this and are interested in this topic, please let me have any feedback, good or bad, so I can make this as useful and easy to read for you as possible.

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 9.24pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I like listening to motivational speakers. There’s a buzz that the good ones create, a feeling of energy and enthusiasm as they deliver their message.

Then it fades and real life starts happening again.

If only life were as simple as listening to someone else’s story and doing things the way they say we should.

Unfortunately, it’s not – and we all need to discover the ways that work for us ourselves. Fortunately, doing that will make us happier and more satisfied with ourselves.

The point I’m trying to make is that there are different ways to get from one point to another, from start to finish. The thing to notice is that you have to go on a journey – and you might as well arrange things so you enjoy the trip.

Let’s put this idea in the context of consultative selling. You have a product or service. The start point is that a prospective customer doesn’t know you exist. The finish point is when they sign a contract.

Thursday, 9.04pm

Sheffield, U.K.

So, you’re in charge of a sales program – a consultative selling one. You’ve got targets, a resource plan, a budget. You’re ready to go. You just need to start prospecting.

Or do you?

Before you start doing anything you should ask yourself a question. Is what you’re about to do worth doing at all?

The reason for asking yourself this question is that the answer you give will decide how you spend your time. And the results you get will come from doing those things hour after hour, day after day.

You reach your goals as a result of all that work you put in over time. So, it makes sense to just check whether it’s the right work for you to be doing.

Let’s start with an example. You’ve just started a new sales role. What does your manager expect you to do?

You’re probably expected to do the modern day equivalent of knocking on doors. Pick up the phone, send emails, connect on social media. Be active. Be busy. More importantly, look busy.

You need to ask yourself whether that is the best use of your time. Let’s say that you’re not actually a professional salesperson. You’re a professional that has now been asked to get some sales in.

You’re actually good at doing something like accounting or law or working with technology. Now you need to go out and get business and the easiest, most obvious way is to “smile and dial”.

The thing that you miss by doing that is the cost of sales.

When your customer buys anything from you they pay a price. Let’s say that price is one hundred dollars. After you do everything you do in your business, you’ll end up (hopefully) with some cash in your pocket. Let’s say that’s 7 dollars.

Sounds good?

Not really. The stuff that eats up the money in the middle is operating costs – everything you need to do to actually deliver what you’ve promised the customer.

Then, at the front end is your cost of sales, the cost of actually getting to your customer and getting them to part with the money in their pocked for what you do.

Why does understanding the cost of sales matter? It matters because you can’t decide what activities are the best use of your time if you don’t price them correctly.

What are your options for bringing in business? Some of these might be on your list:

1. Personal selling – you pick up the phone.
2. Hire a salesperson
3. Advertise
4. Pay an introducer’s commission

Options 2, 3 and 4 have a defined cost associated with them. Option 1 seems free. It’s only free, however, if you value your time at zero. If you place any value on your time whatsoever, you need to decide whether it’s cheaper to go for one of the other options.

The problem is that in consultative sales, 2 and 3 have problems. You can’t easily advertise a product or service when you don’t even know what problem you’re going to solve. Perhaps you haven’t built the product yet.

Then, hiring a professional salesperson has the problems that come with an expensive resource that probably doesn’t have the deep domain knowledge you need to do a decent consultative sell. Your ideal consultative salesperson is someone who knows how to do the job as well, probably one of your operational folk.

These people, however, don’t want to pick up the phone and harass people. They aren’t good at playing the numbers game and just hammering on. They want to do good work and, if they can get in front of someone, they can explain what they do and probably get some business signed. It’s the getting in front of people that’s the problem.

Which leaves the last option – pay an introducer’s commission.

The chances are that there are people out there who spend all their time getting to know people. That’s their thing. If they’re confident that they can get you in front of the right people – and you’re confident that when you’re in front of the right people you can close a deal – then you’ve got a sweet thing going.

You should be happy to pay an introducer’s commission in this situation. You’ve saved hours of time that you can now spend on your business. The introducer makes some money and can carry on partying and meeting people. Everybody wins.

Unless someone gets greedy.

There’s an element of fairness involved. If you try and set your introducer commission too low, then you won’t get any takers. If they want too much or try and grab a slice of ongoing business, then you’re going to have to deal with that.

The best way is to have a number of introducers and negotiate a fair commission, say 20% of the first deal carried out as a result of an introduction. That will keep them bringing you new customers and you’ve got the opportunity to sell more to them later. Logically, you should be willing to pay the introducer whatever it takes – even if your profit on that first deal is zero – as long as you can make it up on the back end – the follow on sales.

It’s only when you decide that there is no way you can set up an arrangement where you pay for sales that you should do it yourself. That’s when you need to sit at your desk and start making calls and sending emails.

If you’re smart, however, you’ll spend your time finding people that can introduce you to the people you need to meet and get a commission agreement in place with them.

Then, you’re actually going to get some real traction in your sales campaign.

So, in summary, the first thing you should do when starting a new sales campaign is not to try and find prospects, but try and find people who can introduce you to prospects. Start building your referral network. That will free you up to focus on selling.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

As a reminder, this is the fourth post in a series that I’m planning on eventually collecting into a book on Consultative Selling. If you are reading this and are interested in this topic, please let me have any feedback, good or bad, so I can make this as useful and easy to read for you as possible.

Monday, 8.56pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I had my first real lesson in how sales works as I sat in the back of a lecture hall listening to Neil Rackham, the author of Spin Selling, talk about his research into the secrets of successful selling. I listened and took notes as Rackham took us through how organisations changed over the last few decades, morphing from lumbering, inefficient beasts to lean, hyper-competitive machines, operating in the age of the Internet.

The world of sales has changed too, as a result. The approaches and lessons of the past cannot be applied blindly today. We need to examine them critically, look at what works, what doesn’t work and what we need to do differently to be successful now.

This starts with understanding the basic framework in which everything happens. Broadly, there are two extremes when it comes to something you can buy. At one end are Transactional products – simple and easy to compare. At the other end are Consultative products, a thing that you might not even realise you need but know you do when someone sits down and works through things with you.

Think of the last time you wanted to buy a book. A book is a good example of a transactional product. It’s the same product whether you buy it in a bookstore like Waterstones or a platform like Amazon. You don’t need someone to persuade you to pick one copy of the book over another. You can go off a recommendation, read a review and pick the place that is most convenient or cheap to get the book. You might even pay more in order to support your local bookstore. And the end, however, it’s a transaction and you simply exchange money for the book and get on with your life.

On the other hand, perhaps you’ve done a construction project, like a home extension. You didn’t just go out and buy and off the shelf extension. Instead, you talked to a few architects, selected one you liked, worked through a number of options, asked them for their opinion, looked at drawings and visualizations and eventually made up your mind. You couldn’t have done all that just by yourself – your architect was your consultant and advisor through the process and helped you make decisions by giving you the benefit of his or her information and expertise. This was a consultative sell.

Decades ago, before the Internet, things didn’t work quite like this. If you wanted a book, you walked into the local store and browsed the racks. Perhaps you spoke to the person behind the counter and asked for recommendations. You might have looked through the paper and read reviews of must-read books for this summer. In fact, there probably weren’t too many times you didn’t have to go into a store and ask someone’s advice, whether you were buying a new set of forks or a new car. The number of transactional sales were quite low then.

When you were in the store, you might be quite happy to pay a bit more if the service was good or if the next available store was several miles away. You’d pay for service, whether you were having your tyres changed or selecting furniture. You wouldn’t have known the options anyway – perhaps you went round three or four shops – but there was no guarantee that you couldn’t find the same thing at 20% off a few miles further on.

In this environment, the job of a salesperson was to help customers pick something. Many of the traditional selling approaches worked on the basis that the salesperson knew more than the customer and was going to spend their time together passing on their knowledge, working to “close” at the end. And that approach worked for a long time.

Then the Internet came along and changed everything. In less than ten years, many products became entirely transactional. Think of all the things you can buy online now without talking to a single person, from pencils and book and shaving cream to cars and televisions and insurance. All you have to do is do some research, compare your options and choose a product. If you know what you want, or are willing to find out by doing some research, you can then simply go on the best platform and buy it.

This has meant that that traditional rump in the middle – where you could go into a store and pay a little bit more for a little more advice has started to disappear. The relentless onslaught of the Internet is making product after product, market after market, more and more transactional. The traditional salesperson’s role is disappearing and being replaced by an online order form.

How about when you don’t know what you want? That’s the other end of the scale and it’s flourishing as well. In situations where you don’t have the expertise to evaluate your options yourself then you need some help. The individuals and organisations that do well here have the ability to help you when you don’t quite know what you need help with. For example, you might have an ache in your forearm, but you need the help of a doctor to tell whether it’s a simple muscle strain or the onset of rheumatism. If you need to carry out a major business transformation you might need to hire experienced consultants who can work with you to create and drive a process that works for your business. That needs a consultative approach.

All this means that different sales skills are needed for transactional and consultative selling. Transactional selling means you have to be great at optimising, at squeezing every last bit out of your systems and workflow and operations. Consultative selling means you have to be good with people, working with them, listening and coming up with creative and useful ideas and approaches. If what you do is repetitive and simple, it will be automated and become transactional. If what you do is human and creative, you’ve got some time still.

The first thing you have to do is figure out where you are and what you need to learn to sell in your business. You have to specialise in one end or the other – either be the best transactional salesperson out there or the best consultative. If you’re in the middle, you’re going to be squeezed out of business.

In this series of posts, I’ll start with consultative selling and then move onto transactional selling later – perhaps in another book.

As a reminder, this set of posts is part of a series that I’m planning on eventually collecting into a book. If you are reading this and are interested in this topic, please let me have any feedback, good or bad, so I can make this as useful and easy to read for you as possible.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh