Provoke Your Customers

No question about it: This is a tough time to be selling to business customers. The budget allowances simply aren’t there. If you thought it was hard to make a sale before—when typically 85% of a customer’s budget was allocated to existing commitments and only 15% remained for discretionary spending—you’re finding out how much harder it can be, as even that fraction disappears in across-the-board cuts. Making matters worse, your customer relationships have lost much of their power. With less money to go around, proposals are subjected to higher levels of review in buying organizations, and the managers you’ve traditionally dealt with are no longer the decision makers. 

All this would be thoroughly discouraging if not for one fact: Companies have survived downturns before, and some have even profited from them. In the research and consulting we’ve done since the 2001 dot-com bust, we’ve seen how. Rather than resign themselves to hearing the standard “Sorry, we have no budget for that,” some vendors—even some very young start-ups—have found a way to reach their customers’ resource owners and motivate them to allocate the necessary funds. Using what we call provocation-based selling, they persuade customers that the solutions they bring to the table are not just nice but essential.

Provocation-based selling goes beyond the conventional consultative or solution-selling approach, whereby the vendor’s sales team seeks out current concerns in a question-and-answer dialogue with customer managers. And it differs dramatically from the most common approach still in use—product-based selling, which pushes features, functionality, and benefits, usually in a generic manner. Provocation-based selling helps customers see their competitive challenges in a new light that makes addressing specific painful problems unmistakably urgent. This approach isn’t right for every selling situation you’ll face in a downturn, nor does it apply only under challenging economic conditions. But for many companies that see their old approaches losing power, its time has come.

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To begin a provocation-based sale, you must do three things well: 

• identify a problem that will resonate with a line executive in the target organization; 
• develop a provocative point of view about that problem (one that links, naturally, to what your company has to offer); and 
•  lodge that provocation with a decision maker who can take the implied action. Let us make a few observations about each step. 

Identify a critical issue 

Formulate your provocation 

Lodge your provocation 

http://hbr.org/2009/03/in-a-downturn-provoke-your-customers/