All posts tagged client-centric

Chapter 21: How To Take Data And Turn It Into Impact

You’ve followed Chapter 19 and 20, assembled a massive pile of facts and figures, and now have to find a way for it to make sense and show how it impacts your prospect.  You have probably found that the data can be grouped together in some obvious categories.  There are two bigger categories that all of the data will fit in:  Problem Data and Impact Data.  We covered Problem Data in Chapter 18, but what is Impact Data?

This is where you want to spend your time, as Impact Data is where the C-Level prospects spend their money.

All companies have problems, and some just sit there, year after year, annoying people who ask, “Why doesn’t the VP of Operations know about this and fix it?”  It is likely that the VP of Operations knows about the problem.  It is also likely that the problem has been evaluated, and one of two things have happened:  the impact of the problem is less than the money or time it would cost to fix the problem or the impact of the problem has not been supported by enough data to prove that fixing it is financially viable.

Understanding the impact of a problem is crucial for proving the business case for any solution you hope to provide.  There are five questions that form the basis of understanding the impact a problem can have on an organization:

  • How do you measure the problem?
  • What is the current situation?
  • What results would you like?
  • What is the value of those results?
  • What is the value of those results over time?

This is relatively straight forward when dealing with hard data.  For example, let’s say that you are trying to sell a university an electronic dormitory room key lock system.  Your conversation might sound something like this:

  • Prospect:  Your electronic dorm room key lock system would increase the security of our 400 dorm rooms.
  • You:  What is the biggest problem that our system would solve? (measurement)
  • Prospect:  We have too many old keys floating around.  We only know where about 80% of them are.
  • You:  That’s about 200 keys that you are missing. (current situation)  What would be an acceptable percentage of unaccounted keys?  (desired results)
  • Prospect:  We need it to be zero, because it costs us $65 to rekey a lock.
  • You:  Let’s see, 400 dorm rooms times $65 dollars a lock…that’s $26,000.  (value impact)
  • Prospect:  And students are constantly losing keys, getting duplicates, moving in and out of dorms…we just aren’t as safe as we could be.
  • You:  If this is a continuing problem, then over four years at two semesters per year, you could have a total of over $200,000 in rekeying costs.  (value impact over time)

Other types of products and services can be more difficult to prove impact, as they often rely on soft or inferred data.  For example, let’s say that you are trying to sell a mass notification system to a university that would alert students to dangerous situations on campus.  Your conversation might sound something like this:

  • Prospect:  Your software would help keep our students safe from gun violence on campus.
  • You:  Other than the possibility of fatalities, what is the biggest problem that gun violence would create for the university?  (measurement)
  • Prospect:  Our students and staff would feel very unsafe, and the bad press we would receive would severely harm the university’s reputation.
  • You:  How do your students and staff feel now, and what is your university’s reputation for security?  (current situation)
  • Prospect:  We’ve never had a major incident, so our students and staff feel safe, and we have a reputation as a place where parents can send their kids and know that they are safe.  This is especially important for our foreign students and their parents.  (prospects implies desired results)
  • You:  What would happen if you had an incident that made the evening news?  (value impact)
  • Prospect:  Other universities have seen their enrollments decline by 10%…almost 25% for foreign students.  (inferred data)
  • You:  Let’s be conservative…if we take your 20,000 students, reduce enrollment by just 5%, and multiply it by your $15,000 tuition…that’s about $15,000,000 in lost tuition alone, not counting the fact that foreign students pay more and stop attending at a higher rate.  (value impact)  How long would it take to regain your reputation, and ultimately your students?  (value impact over time)
  • Prospect:  Others have recovered in three years, some never fully recovered from their foreign student losses.
  • You:  If that is the case, your university could face well over $30,000,000 in tuition losses.  (value impact over time)

This is of course simplistic and scripted, but hopefully you can see how there needs to be a process to help both you and your prospect understand the impact of the problem, especially the financial impact, so that you can create a better business case.

2 Comments
by Jack Turley on September 7, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Client-centric sales, Defining Problems, Hard Questions, Measure Success, Perfect Information, ROI
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by Jack Turley on September 7, 2012

https://clientcentricsales.com/2012/09/07/how-to-take-data-and-turn-it-into-impact/

Chapter 7: Earning Trust Before You Ask the Tough Questions

To fully succeed at sales, we must think and act with a client-centric mindset at all times.  To do that, we need to first gather accurate information from our prospect, and to get that information, we must have trust.

We can’t have trust until we earn trust.

What happens if at our first meeting, we ask, “what were the three biggest failures of your department last year?”  Count yourself lucky if instead of a door in the face, you only get a blank stare followed by a variation of, “our department has had no major issues over the past fiscal year.”  Either way, you are shut out, possibly for good. But you read “Chapter 6:  Partnering with your Prospect,” and you understand the need to ask those tough questions.  Why are our prospects afraid to answer those questions?  Don’t they want to help their company by doing a better job?

People are people, and whether it is due to personal ego, petty internal politics, the inability to get to useful information, or just because there has been so little trust built with past salespeople, most prospects have built up wide moats and massive walls to protect their world from people like you.  Don’t take it personally – it is just part of the dysfunctional sales dynamic that was built long before you were born.

How do you ask 100 MPH hardball questions when your prospect is used to underhand slow pitched softballs?  Or maybe even even used to hitting off the Tee?

(A note to my international friends:  sorry for the baseball sports analogy.  While I understand your puzzlement with an American sport that has an event called the World Series but negates to invite teams from outside North America, my shameful lack of cricket or rugby analogies forces my hand here.  Client-Centric Sales will endeavor to keep sports metaphors to a minimum.)

If you haven’t already, read Chapter 3:  Becoming an Expert in Order to Qualify Successfully.   When you become an expert on your prospect’s industry, company, and problems, you are taking down the first set of barriers that prospects usually put up. They will open the door quite a bit wider for you if they have “discovered” you through your previous industry networking on LinkedIn, through trade associations, or by referral.  If you managed to invite yourself for a meeting to discuss industry best practices and how upcoming regulations may impact their business, they may drop their defenses even further.  If you keep your corporate brochures and PowerPoints under lock and key (believe it or not, they don’t want to see your 12 slides of org charts), you have the possibility of opening up a real dialog.  And if during that initial dialog, which may take place over several meetings, you can keep your mind off your quota and instead focus on your prospects issues, you may become successful at avoiding the salesperson’s biggest offense:  Listening With Intent To Sell.

We’ve all done that.  We get a great dialog going and then 20% into the discussion, we start to tune out and figure out how we are going to sell the prospect the new POS-2150 GlurpMaster 2.0 with an extended warranty agreement.

Wrong.

Keep listening.  Don’t think solutions yet – that’s a ways off.  Listen some more.  Ask questions that help you both discover the deep sources of the problem instead of the more easily recognized topical symptoms.  Your competitors have already tried to sell bandaids; you, my friend, are going to do surgery. So listen.  When the prospect comes to what he or she believes is the end of the answer, keep digging. Your prospect may declare that he or she has reached a conclusion, and that you are ready to discuss a solution.  Don’t take the easy way out and stop there.  If you are working on what appears to be a promising line of questioning, keep going.  It is often as easy as taking a short pause, and asking, “what else?”

Asking “what else?” is an amazingly powerful question.  A local Fortune 500 company turned into a long term client due mainly to the fact that I kept asking that question. When the prospect got to the point that he thought he was done, I would ask “what else?” It was only after asking “what else?” 14 more times that we finally drilled down far enough for us both to understand the problem.  Reaching that understanding allowed us to zero in on a solution which saved the client almost $1M.

I didn’t sell anything that day.  I helped someone understand his business, identify a problem, and enact a solution.  The solution was simple and had nothing to do with my company or what I had to sell.  But you can bet the next time I met with this company, I was treated as a trusted advisor, not a salesman.  At that point, I was in a position to ask the really tough questions, discuss the elephants in the room, and mutually engage with this company to look at other issues that I could directly help them resolve.

Leave a comment
by Jack Turley on December 19, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Brutal Facts, Client Dynamics, Client-centric sales, Hard Questions, Perfect Information
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by Jack Turley on December 19, 2011

https://clientcentricsales.com/2011/12/19/chapter-7-earning-trust-before-you-ask-the-tough-questions/

Chapter 6 – Partnering with your Prospect

In the last chapter we looked at the three most common ways to fail at sales.  Those three methodologies have been repeated and perfected through the years, and are very effective at making sure the client doesn’t get what he or she wants while turning you into ineffective salesperson.  As you have probably guessed, there is a better way.

Let’s work with a simple example.  Do you have a friend who is a gadget freak? Someone who drools over technical specs, compares all the different models, and camps out overnight at the Apple store every time a new product is released?  If you were in the market for a new cell phone, you might seek guidance from this person, discussing the pros and cons of different models and operating systems, all the while interacting as equals.  Perhaps at the end of your discussion, you might trust his judgement in this purchase more than you would your own.  This friend has little or nothing to gain in advising you, and you would probably take the advice given as trusted, impartial, and based on your true needs, resulting in your purchase of a perfect new cell phone.

It is this kind of dynamic that we are trying to create with a client-centric sale.

In the real world of sales, this isn’t always easy.  Most prospects have been trained over the years to expect salespeople telling them what they need (usually based on selling what they have) without really understanding their business.  As the saying goes, “If all you sell are hammers, after a while everything starts to look like a nail.”  If not that, prospects are used to telling salespeople what they want, eschewing any kind of value-add dialog from the salesperson that might benefit the prospect’s company.  If it is a large, complex, or technical sale, it is very likely that there will be a great deal of guessing by both the salesperson and the prospect.  These dysfunctional selling practices were covered in greater detail in Chapter 5.

A better way is to focus on a collaborative and consultative sale, acting as if you were not on commission, but instead were hired to help your client complete a successful project. Just as a hired consultant would do research with the client in able to unearth useful data, you will need to do the same with your prospect. During this question asking process, it is very likely that your client will not have all of the answers you require to create an optimum solution.  This is good news, not bad.  I have learned over the years that in the end, the salesman with the best answers does not win the sale.  My experience has shown the opposite:  the salesman with the best questions wins.

It is here that Client-Centric Sales takes a sharp turn away from the well known traditional consultative sales techniques that have been taught for decades.  At first, things might appear very similar to what you are used to.  But as we get deeper into the salesperson-prospect relationship, you will see that success comes from asking questions that your contact won’t be able to answer.  This opens up the opportunity for both you and your prospect to engage others within the organization.  Besides creating a greater sense of corporate buy-in, you may learn, for example, that you have been talking to the wrong person, that the project doesn’t have firm funding, that the European division wants the same solution, or that the president has squashed the project several times in the past. The right questions will help you continually qualify your prospect.

Client-Centric Sales is based on this methodology.  The chapters that follow will help you learn how to ask tough questions, obtain relevant data, meet key people within the organization, verify funding, cooperatively build a business case, jointly present it, and reach a definitive decision.

So roll up your sleeves.  We’re about to get our hands dirty.

2 Comments
by Jack Turley on December 15, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Client Dynamics, Client Win, Client-centric sales, Prospect Qualifying, Win-Win Sales
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by Jack Turley on December 15, 2011

https://clientcentricsales.com/2011/12/15/chapter-6-partnering-with-your-prospect/