The rise of big data has been a double-edged sword for some. While customers have embraced data as it allows for easier price comparisons, their persistent focus on short-term savings has created new challenges for sellers—mainly, by undercutting the power of storytelling.

A member we recently spoke with shared how increasingly data-driven customers in the electronics industry have become so focused on price that they often lose sight of their vision and initial objectives behind a purchase.

“It’s like trying to buy a painting based only on numbers and price comparisons–which is impossible–when in fact it’s the story behind the painting that sells,” he said, describing the whole situation.

His experience refers to a growing phenomenon we are seeing in sales today: customers’ increasing use of data and rational reasoning in the purchasing decision (This, in fact, was one of the trends we believe every Sales Exec must know in 2012).

In today’s tough economy, everyone wants to get the most for their money. It’s natural for customers to try to break down deal components and compare apples to apples. And if customers want to do it that way, isn’t it natural for sales reps to respond using data and numbers too?

But therein lies the problem. The customer’s persistent focus on price and short-term savings distracts them from the real issue at hand—the long-term strategic value of your solution. Read More »

We hope you’ll read this and share this.

It’s a unique occasion when we get to step back from the day-to-day of supporting our members’ decisions and reflect on where we believe the world of sales is headed. In 2011, the SEC had thousands of interactions with sales executives around the globe, held dozens of conferences and intimate roundtable discussions with leading CSOs, and examined hundreds of thousands data points.

Given this, we’d like to share the fundamental shifts we expect to play out in increasingly significant ways in 2012.

Granted, it’s not a MECE list – there is overlap and implications shared throughout these trends, but we hope you’ll take a minute and reflect on how these trends are manifesting in your own organization, disagree if appropriate, and highlight trends you expect to see that we missed. It’s meant to be a reflective, but fun list. We look forward to your input! Read More »

We see this happen all the time—a rep walks into a customer’s office, hands them a company brochure, and spends the next 30-minutes telling the customer all about their product’s features and benefits (many of which are of little significance to the customer’s business).

Not surprisingly, this type of approach often fails to capture the customer’s attention.

In today’s world of increased deal scrutiny and higher consensus requirements, features-based selling no longer works. In fact, SEC analysis reveals that teaching delivered during the sales experience has the largest impact on customer loyalty, more than product, company, brand, and service delivery combined.

The best companies recognize this and reverse the flow of their customer interactions—they adopt a Commercial Teaching approach that ‘leads to’ rather than ‘leads with’ information about their products and services.

One of the companies we spoke to in the course of our research, W.W. Grainger, is doing exactly this— Read More »

In the classic film “The Wizard of Oz” Dorothy leaves the grey world of depression-era Kansas and lands in the gleaming Technicolor world of Oz, where she begins a journey down the yellow brick road. Along the way she meets a mix of characters, and takes time to learn about and reflect on each one’s needs and goals.

Watching this old favorite reminded me of a key challenge sales reps now face—as reps seek to broaden customers’ perception of value, it brings them into contact with a greater number and variety of stakeholders across the organization.

But, reps can no longer have identical conversations with each customer stakeholder they come into contact with, because the outcomes each contact is trying to accomplish are different.  The technical specifications that resonate so well with engineering contacts fall flat when talking to folks in finance or marketing.

That’s why reps must identify the context and goals each individual is trying to achieve and tailor their conversations to them.

The question is: how do we make it easier for reps to tailor?

Well, the Wizard of Oz actually provides three tips on tailoring that can help reps get past the black and white “So What?” and bring customers into tailored Technicolor:   Read More »

For the past few years, we’ve been talking a lot about how to revamp an underperforming value proposition.

And for the past few years, sales leaders have been telling us – again and again – thanks, but no thanks. It’s not that revitalizing their flagging sales messages is not a top priority. It’s just that all the ways to do it sound so hard!

To be fair, re-vamping a value proposition is not for the light of heart. Consider some of the typical questions and discussion topics it requires: What do we stand for? Why are we in business? What makes us unique?

These are the fluffy, hold-hands-with-your-colleague type of questions that can get you canned when you’re tied to a number and you were expected to deliver it yesterday.

One Head of Sales Training summed it up nicely:  “The only thing worse than having to spend three days on an insane spiritual quest for a new value prop…is having to do it with marketing in the room screaming at you the whole time.” It’s no wonder so many of our members have such an allergic reaction to the idea. For most it’s a non-starter.

And in all honesty, we can’t blame you. Read More »

(This is a guest post by Yi Kang of the Marketing Leadership Council,our sister program for heads of Marketing.)

One of the most unsettling aspects of customers’ purchase decisions is deciding whether or not they’re buying the right thing. Purchasers fret a lot less about whether they’ve bought the “best” over the “better” product than they do over whether they’ve eliminated “bad” product in favor of the “good”. Risk needs to be addressed, and addressed well.

Moreover, in any environment, risk left unspecified can turn into uncertainty, which is still risky, but worse.

Many companies believe that emphasizing positive differentiators is the key to winning business. This is true but insufficient. We forget that for the most part success is simply the absence of failure, as opposed to the celebration of pure technical genius.

It is this less inspiring definition that requires marketers and sales reps to focus on risk as much as they do their value proposition. Read More »

By Andrew Kent

In my previous post, I argued that the conflict of interest between energy & utility companies and their customers makes these companies’ business models unsustainable. In short, the more efficiently customers use energy, the less money energy suppliers make—and customers won’t remain in the dark forever.

The solution, I believe, is to stop selling stuff (kilowatt-hours, therms, or joules) and start selling outcomes (light, heat, and motion). Indeed, one forward-thinking utility company recently shared with us their new Commercial Teaching pitch that focuses B2B customers on the money they could save from energy efficiency building retrofits, and off the price per kilowatt-hour.

It’s a compelling pitch, especially in deregulated markets.  The customer saves money off its energy bill (the payback period is typically just 3-5 years), and the supplier picks up a new account.

But while energy investments make economic sense, customers have been surprisingly slow on the uptake, frequently rejecting energy projects that are in their economic self-interest.

For example, a contact in the green building industry warned me that most decision-makers are unreasonably skeptical of energy solutions, due to a lack of case studies proving they work, and the inherent difficulty with quantifying energy savings (i.e., external conditions may cause energy use to increase, even though that increase may be less than it would have been otherwise thanks to energy saving projects.).

Therefore, just as in any case when a customer is not thinking about its business properly, the burden falls on Sales to reframe how customers think about energy use.   Read More »

The elevator door opens, and there stands your dream prospect…it’s the chance you’ve been waiting for to close that huge deal. But that chance only lasts as long as the elevator ride itself, so you must be ready to quickly and succinctly get your point across.

The ‘elevator pitch’ has long been a staple in Sales’ lore. We’ve all heard the stories of the elevator pitch that got a rep a meeting with the senior decision-maker or helped close that big deal.

But new technology in elevator systems could make the elevator pitch a thing of the past…

New elevator systems now have the capabilities to route riders, sometimes according to rank and seniority. Read More »

By Andrew Kent

Nobody can sell an idea better than television’s Don Draper, the creative advertising genius in the show Mad Men. And after watching nearly the entire series in an embarrassingly short amount of time, I think I know what makes him so good: Don Draper is a Challenger™. He understands his customers’ businesses better than they do, and isn’t afraid to tell them. And if a customer ignores his advice in favor of bad ideas, he’ll likely fire them.

Here are three things Don Draper knows that most sellers and corporate executives haven’t figured out:

1. The customer is not always right.

   Watch Don Draper tell the customer they’re wrong

   The “customer is always right” mantra has long driven salespeople to bend over backwards to satisfy insane customer demands, only to then wonder why customers are disappointed when they get exactly what they’d asked for.

   Not Don Draper—he leaves that attitude for customer service. Don Draper knows that if he were to create the advertisement the customer asked for, he’d end up producing the same ad as every other agency. Not a recipe for loyalty.   Read More »

(This post is the third and final piece in our three-part series about creating compelling sales messages.)

In my last post, we continued on our journey to craft a sales message that can move customer conversations beyond price and position the buying decision in favor of our solution as a supplier.

To recap, the Council suggests using a 3-step process to create this kind of sales message: Challenge Assumptions, Brainstorm Organizational Competencies, and Identify Your Differentiators.

We’ve already tackled steps 1 and 2 in previous posts – In this post, let’s talk about the third and final step: identifying your differentiators.  Here, the purpose is to prioritize those competencies underappreciated by customers where you outperform the competition.  The desired outcome is to uncover differentiators that are pressing enough to alter customer behavior.

Follow the identification process and activities presented below to vet your list of competencies (a list uncovered by completing the activities in Step 2) for true differentiators.

It’s worth repeating once again that our suggestion is to get key senior sales executives, a few high performing front line managers and sales reps, marketing folks, finance folks (anyone that would and should have a say in this matter) together in a room, and work to conclusion on the following activities:   Read More »