Your Client’s Value Lens

                                                              Figure 1:  How to create Value in Your Client’s Value Lens?

Your dream client views the world through their own lens. They see the world through the framework of their industry, their business model, their own business, their challenges, their opportunities, and their experiences. The individual stakeholders within their company each have their own experiences and biases, too. 

The biases create a lens through which your client (and the stakeholders who make up your client) view the world. That lens shapes how they perceive value. Call it their value lens. 

When the value that you create is aligned with your prospective client’s value lens, it’s easy to sell. They perceive the value in what you sell, and it aligns with and supports their worldview. But the trouble begin when your prospective client’s lens deletes or distorts the value that you create.  

Distortions and Deletions 

Let’s use price as an example. You might be able to produce far greater results than your low price competitors. You might even be able to prove a compelling ROI that any CFO would be proud to sign off on. But some of your prospective clients (some stakeholders) will have a value lens that deletes the value you create. Their lens only lets in “lowest price.” If they don’t see lowest price, their lens deletes the value you create; it’s not enough for you to win their business. 

But the deletion and distortion of value occur in other areas. 

Your dream client might have a stakeholder who perceives value through a political lens. If your solution doesn’t allow them to bury some internal opponent, they perceive other solutions as more valuable. If it doesn’t help them make the political case that they should be promoted, they can’t perceive the value. 

Match the Value or Change the Worldview  

There aren’t any easy answers for dealing with problems of value deletion and distortion. You can sometimes align the value you create with your client’s value lens. Other times you have to work on changing your dream client’s value lens altogether. Neither is easy, and swapping out the lens takes a lot of time. But the sooner you start working on understanding what your dream client sees through their value lens, the sooner you can match it or start helping to change it. 

Questions 

What does your client perceive through their value lens? 

What do you do when you have a mismatch between the value you create and your prospective client’s value lens? 

How do prospective clients delete the value you create by viewing it through their lens? 

How do they distort the value you create because of their lens? 

How do you match or change their lens?  

Conclusion

When selling solutions we first focus on prospective client's problem and reasons for it before offering anything. This we do in such a way that client explains us about the problem and reasons for it. Also, in the next step the buyer together with us develops the vision of how to solve this problem. This means that we are much more in line with him and if we work on this together with client the value lens will be known to us and the solution will be designed according to them. So, with solution selling we greatly eliminate the danger of distortions and deletions.

References 

Innarino S. Anthony: Adventures in the New Art of Sales and Sales Management. Retrieved July 12, 2013 from http://thesalesblog.com/blog/2013/07/05/your-clients-value-lens/

Blaž Mertelj

Managing Director & Senior Consultant

A Cheap Sales Force Is An Expensive Problem

                                                                                  Figure 1: Do You Invest in Sales Force?

From time to time we hear from entrepreneurs who want to grow their revenue without investing in a sales force. Some want to put no money at risk, but they want the results that only come from real investments. They want to be cheap for different reasons, but it’s often a resistance to paying before they get results or because they’ve been burned by salespeople that didn’t produce. 

Regardless of the reason for not investing, a cheap sales force is really more expensive sales force. You may believe that commission-only salespeople, independent agents, or very low paid salespeople will help you grow your business and reach your goals, but they won’t.

Commission Only

Commission-only is a compensation structure that works in some industries, and mostly only where the sales cycle is short enough to allow the salesperson to be immediately compensated upon making the sale. It isn’t easily applied to long-sales cycle, complex sales where the salesperson might take months to build a pipeline and start winning big deals. Running down the commission-only road costs you time–time that you can’t ever recover.

Sometimes independent agents work. But if they represent you along with a lot of other products and services, you have very little control over how much of their effort is really made representing and selling on your behalf. More lost time and more lost opportunities. 

  

Very Low Base, High Bonus

You may be tempted to try a very low base, very high commission strategy. But getting compensation plans right is more complicated than simply basing the base pay on how little you can get away with paying. If the compensation structure prevents you from acquiring the talent you need to compete and win, it’s an expensive sales force. You’ll spend time, effort, and money without producing the results you need.

Don’t believe that this means you should pay any price for the talent you need. Getting the talent you need requires a thoughtful, well planned, and well executed compensation structure. Your budget is a consideration, but there isn’t any way to build a professional sales force without making the necessary investment. The cheaper you are when it  comes to investing in a professional sales force, the worse your results will be–if you even produce any results at all.

Questions

What is the primary reason some people don’t want to invest in a professional sales force?

What are the real costs of an ineffective sales force?

How do you afford a sales force when you have real financial constraints?

How do you design a compensation structure that produces the real results you need? 

How much is that driven by real constraints and how much is imagined constraints or personal resistance to paying?

How manager knows s/he is managing (sales force and risk)? 

Conclusion

You actually try to avoid the risk you should take. You are supposed to manage your sales people. You should take and manage this risk. It is naive to believe any payment scheme will td sme vate of it. But you need tools and some practice...

References

Innarino S. Anthony: Adventures in the New Art of Sales and Sales Management. Retrieved June 28, 2013 from http://thesalesblog.com/blog/2013/06/05/a-cheap-sales-force-is-an-expensive-problem/

Blaž Mertelj

Managing Director & Senior Consultant

How to Create Client Value?

In a world where it’s hard to differentiate on the product alone, people buy from people who create value for them – through the insights they bring to the table, the solutions they create, and the help they provide around the buying process.  Great salespeople can be challenging, but rather than being seen as intrusive, they are seen as trusted business advisors. 

 'Creating Client Value' (CCV) methodology has been helping salespeople to drive revenue growth for the last decade and was developed in a unique collaboration between Imparta and Neil Rackham, the author of SPIN® Selling and arguably the world’s leading researcher into sales effectiveness. It has been continuously improved since then, based on experience with thousands of salespeople in the field.

CCV concentrates on consultative selling - that space where salespeople help their customers understand their issues and opportunities in a new way and then show them solutions which closely match their needs.

CCV has generated hundreds of millions of pounds in identified incremental revenue by focusing on the process the customer goes through, rather than on a 'sales process'. Recognising where the customer is in their own process is critical in being able to support and influence them through each stage. There are five major stages in any buying decision, as shown in the following Buying Cycle:  

Awareness of the Needs

During this phase, the buyer moves from being happy with the status quo, to recognising the need to change an existing product, service, process or supplier. The role of the salesperson during this phase is to identify possible opportunities, and to navigate the different buyer roles, testing different “sweet spots” between the client’s needs and your capabilities.  The salesperson also needs to help the customer build urgency around addressing their needs, quantify the value that a solution would create, and overcome barriers to change. In particular, that means coaching people within the target organisation to understand their own stakeholders, and to create a movement for change. 

The specific outcomes we need to create during the Awareness of Needs stage of the buying cycle include:

• Building the sales pipeline though more targeted lead generation activities and a better understanding of how to navigate complex buyer roles and gain access to new opportunities;
• Reducing cycle time and increasing average account size by building a deep understanding of a client or target’s business issues and KPIs. This allows salespeople to uncover needs across the wider organisation, while allowing benefits to be expressed in the customer’s own terms to a range of stakeholders; 
• Further increasing account size by understanding your own company’s capabilities at different levels, and mapping these onto the customer’s needs in a process of structured creativity; 
• Improving the conversion rate from target to prospect, through questioning skills, a clear understanding of decision roles, and the ability to make a quantified case for change that covers the full range of value created for the customer.

Assessment of Alternatives

At this point the customer has decided to act and is evaluating the product or service against competing alternatives (which can include doing nothing). The salesperson or account manager needs to help the buyer(s) to identify and rank their decision criteria in order of importance.  Then they need to identify how your offer is perceived vs. the alternatives, and finally to use a set of powerful strategies to position your offering in the best possible way against these criteria. This can be counterintuitive for salespeople, who often take a 'head in the sand' approach to the competition – but these strategies have a major impact on win rates.

The specific outcomes we need to create during the Assessment of Alternatives stage of the buying cycle include:

• Building trusted relationships by helping to clarify the criteria that specific customers (including purchasing departments) will use to assess your solution against those of competitors;
• Improving success rates in competitive situations (one client measured an improvement from 1 in 10 to 3 in 10) by analysing these criteria and developing strategies to deal with them using some very powerful tools;
• More specifically, delivering winning pitches by basing them on this analysis rather than a generic presentation around your strengths;
• Improving profitability and maximising margins by managing the discounting behaviour of staff and dealing better with procurement departments.

Alleviation of Risk

During this stage, the customer has narrowed their choice of preferred solution, but begins to think about the personal and business risks that may be involved. The role of the salesperson is to uncover these risks and help them find ways to address them. This can again be a counterintuitive process for salespeople, who need to become comfortable with discussing risks as well as alleviating them.

The specific outcomes we need to create during the Alleviation of Risk stage of the buying cycle include:

• Reducing the number of stalled opportunities by identifying when risks are blocking progress and uncovering risks at the strategic, tactical, political and personal levels;
• Improving the conversion rate by exploring and resolving the obstacles to a decision. This involves different skills depending on the type of risks being experienced: strategic, tactical, political and individual;
• Managing competitive threats by developing a shared, client-focused approach to business development.

Decision 

Decision: Although a decision flows much more naturally when the principles of CCV are applied, there is still a need to finalise contractual agreements and it is at this stage that Procurement will most often begin to exert pricing pressure. This is not covered specifically within CCV, but in the companion material on Negotiating Client Value and Commercial Acumen.

Achievements of Results

In this final phase, the decision has been made and the solution is being implemented. The salesperson’s role will vary depending on how you handle implementation, but at a minimum it should be to prepare for a successful implementation, help to anticipate potential issues, and look for additional opportunities. 

The specific outcomes we need to create during the Achievement of Results stage of the buying cycle include:

• Increasing customer satisfaction by understanding the three phases of implementation that follow a sale – the honeymoon, disenchantment and success periods – and making sure that value promised is actually delivered, and that new opportunities are identified;
• Reducing the costs of acquiring further business through increased confidence from the client;
• Identifying new opportunities by being visible during implementation, and actively managing referrals.

At this point, the buying cycle kicks off again. 

References

Imparta: The Creating Client Value Methodology. Retrieved June 21, 2013 from http://www.imparta.com/index.php/en/sales/ccv#achievement-of-results

Blaž Mertelj

Managing Director & Senior Consultant

Top Sellers are Great Storytellers

What sets top sales people apart? What is it that they do better than the rest? There are, of course, a number of factors that has been presented in previous set of three blogs: Common Attributes of a Top Seller, but one that we frequently observe is that top sellers are great storytellers. They put their points across not by pitching their products, but by sharing relevant, situation-specific anecdotes and stories that their prospects can relate to.

Your most experienced and effective sales people - and your senior executives - probably have a stock of these stories. Telling them seems natural. But just imagine how much more effective the rest of your sales team - and those working for your business partners - could be if they had a similar stock of stories and the skills to share them effectively?

The challenge is that many expert story-tellers turn out to be “unconsciously competent”. They may not have thought about sharing them in a structured or systematic way with others in your organisation. You probably need a mechanism for capturing these stories, and publishing them in a format that makes it easy for otherteam members to re-tell them - and to identify the right stories for the appropriate circumstances.

Everybody brings his or her unique personality to story-telling. But there is a formula - it’s not dissimilar to the “story arc” used by the developers of movie scripts - that leads the listener towards the conclusion you want them to reach. Here’s one that we’ve found particularly effective in the B2B environment:

“One of our customers, [company name] a [type of company] first came to us because [brief description of critical issue]. It was causing [consequences] and affecting [people/ departments/functions affected by the issue].

They had tried dealing with it by [previous unsuccessful initiative, if one existed], but had struggled because [reason why previous attempts had failed].

Working with their [key sponsor’s role], we helped them implement [brief description of our key capabilities] that allowed them to [brief description of benefits]. But that wasn’t all – as a further unexpected benefit they found they were also able to [unexpected benefit].”

You see what’s happening here? The story-teller starts by setting the scene. Then they describe the need for change, and the barriers that stood in the way. Then they show how they were able to help. And then finally, they add a memorable additional benefit. They don’t necessarily have to have experienced the situation at first hand - the prospect understands that they are telling the story based on their company’s collective experience.

You don’t need to incorporate all these elements into every story. But following the sequence helps. The final documented anecdote should be seen as a guideline for successful storytelling, and not a rigid script. It needs to sound natural, and not forced. But we hope you agree that the framework helps to convey a powerful, memorable and relevant story.

References

Apollo B. (2013). Inflexion-Points: Smart Ideas for Accelerating Revenue Growth. Top Sellers are Great Storytellers. A simple framework for harnessing the power of anecdotes Retrieved May 14, 2013 from http://www.inflexion-point.com/Portals/41408/docs/inflexion-point%20anecdote%20template.pdf

Tamara Ćetković

Consultant, Coach & Project Manager

Inside Sales Virtual Summit

About InsideSales.com, Inc.

InsideSales.com is the worldwide leader in cloud-based, sales acceleration and predictive analytics for inside sales professionals.

InsideSales.com holds four patents and pioneered landmark research featured in Harvard Business Review, Inc., Forbes and Fast Company. Their PowerDialer for Salesforce 5.0 has been one of the most popular applications on the salesforce.com AppExchange for over five years. The company was #9 by Inc. Magazine for employee growth in Utah and #347 on Deloitte's 2012 Technology Fast 500. Enterprise customers include ADP, Dell, Gannett Local, Inc., Marketo, ON24, Re/Max Cornerstone, Seagate, Groupon and more. 

InsideSales.com Recognized as Inside Sales Provider of the Year

InsideSales.com, the leading provider of cloud-based sales acceleration and predictive analytics technology for inside sales professionals, was recognized by the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP) as the SaaS Productivity Provider of the Year for its PowerDialer for Salesforce 5.0 product. The Award is based specifically on feedback from the membership of the national association.

Additionally, AA-ISP recognized the Top 25 Most Influential Inside Sales Professionals.

Top 25 recipients listed in alphabetical order:

• Julio Acosta- Global Inside Sales Manager at Infoblox
• Lauren Bailey- President at Factor 8
• Daniel Barber- Manager, NA Sales Development West at Responsys
• Louis Bernstein- Chief Sales Officer at Izenda**
• Trish Bertuzzi- President & Chief Strategist at The Bridge Group, Inc.**
• Carolynn Betts- CEO at Betts Recruiting
• Mike Brooks- Owner & President at Mr. Inside Sales
• Chad Burmeister- Director, National Accounts at ON24**
• Michael Critchfield- VP of Sales at InsideSales.com*
• Dave Elkington- CEO and Founder at InsideSales.com*
• Kevin Gaither- VP of Sales at uSamp
• Chris Hardeman- VP of Corporate Sales at Act-On Software**
• Barrett Hennessey- Account Executive at PeopleAnswers
• Kraig Kleeman- Author/Speaker/Global Strategist atBlaire Group
• Ken Krogue- President and Founder at InsideSales.com*
• Kelly Lichtenberger- Director of Inside Sales at LifeSize Communications
• Kelly Molander- Director of Inside Sales at TIBCO Spotfire
• Shawn Naggiar- Chief Revenue Officer at Act-On Software**
• Laurie Page- Managing Partner at The Bridge Group, Inc.**
• Rodney President- Indirect Sales Supervisor, Capital Access Network
• Mark Ruthfield- VP of Sales, Executive Team at ZoomInfo
• MJ Shutte- VP of Corporate Sales at Riverbed Technology
• John Smithers- Enterprise Account Manager at Oracle
• Art Sobczak- Owner at Business by Phone, Inc.
• Julio Viskovic- Sensei of Enterprise Sales Enablement at HootSuite**

Listed are three InsideSales.com executives* and seven executives of InsideSales.com customers.**

"It has been wonderful to be recognized as a company by other members of the national trade association of our peers," says Ken Krogue, founder and president of InsideSales.com. "And for three of our own to rub shoulders with this list of incredible people is very humbling. We will continue to do all we can to grow this exciting industry!"

Click to view additional awards given on the AA-ISP website: www.aa-isp.org/inside-sales-awards.php.

To learn more about the InsideSales.com technologies for sales teams including their lead management software, visit www.insidesales.com.

References

 

Press Release: InsideSales.com: InsideSales.com Recognized as Inside Sales Provider of the Year. Retrieved June 20, 2013 from http://finance.yahoo.com/news/insidesales-com-recognized-inside-sales-115600679.html

Tamara Ćetković

Consultant, Coach & Project Manager

How to Defend Your Price?

Atol Business Solutions CEO Blaž Mertelj explains how to defend your price in common sales situation, how to attack your client, how to create client value, the meaning of sales complexity and investment in sales (Atol INSIGHTS). 

How to defend a price in a common sales situation ? 

I am sure you are familiar with this situation: »We present our product and we say the price and immediately we get the answer that this is too much, your competitor's have better prices«. 

Our price is attacked so we defend it. This sounds like, we have many advantages, we name some features, many of them are not relevant to our client.

Quite often we don't even say the right price because we don't know we are able to defend it, that is even worse. But why do we have to defend it? Because buyers actually don't know why they should buy and how much this is worth and frankly nether do sellers.

So here is the answer: "You have to know the value to the client, we have to know what we actually bring them, but this is not enough, the buyer has to know it to, it is the only situation where there won't be an attack to your price". But in order to know that you need information, you need to know why they should buy from their prospective.

In B2B »selling to businesses« you are offering topically improves their business and every improvement in business means bringing value. So understand the buyers problem or competitors shortcomings, understand how much this cost to your buyer (how much your offering actually brings), because whatever cost you have eliminated or opportunity that they miss, you have brought back to them it has significant value. As long as this value is more than your price difference or special price, that defence won't be necessary.

Could you explain what did you mean by attacking ? 

I know that this attack world does not fit into really into standard sales practices. But we have difficult business environment right now and sellers are expected to bring value to buyers, so they have to challenge buyers and being more aggressive, being challenging is not a bed thing, many services has shown that. Only sellers who know exactly what they are selling and why is this good for buyers can act aggressive, convincing, challenging, so it is actually an additional point of their sales team and also perception by the client.

So what do I mean by attack? If you know exactly what you bring to your client, and together with client you have understood the value, like loosing for example 100 k eur per year, you can calculate that each month they loose around 10K eur, so with your solution, with whatever you are bringing that money to them, so it is quite ok if you say this buyer to this manager who is responsible person, why you don't make this decision today? Forget about the cost that is like 5K EUR higher that the competitors, but here we are we can start in a week, and bay doing so we can start gaining that money (10K EUR per month) immediately. You can attack by asking questions: Why not immediately? Or How can you afford not to start immediately? and similar questions, of course formulate them by yourself. 

Do the clients immediately see the value you bring, are they thinking in this way or you need to somehow help them get the value?

Sure, this is an obvious question. Of course in the meeting they wont tell you we are loosing that much and if you brought your offering to us, your solution that would immediately bring this value, of course not. It is important before that really understand what their issue is, why are the considering buying a solution, looking for a new suppler, or changing the way how they work? 

But this is a long process, to understand them, to build the confidence with buyers so that they open up and tell you why and what lies behind. Of course during that process they would probably or they have to explain you number behind, of course with every reason, every difficulty they face if we as the right questions like: How many times this happens? How much money did this cost you the last time? or something like that, we will collect the data later together we can say: "So this happens like two times last year, and three times previous year? And each time it cost you approximately 70k EUR?" You know, you can come up with tangible value, that currently this problem cost them, and the rest is as I said before: "If they believe our solution is actually helping them with this it automatically said how much our solution is worth to them." 

This sound really complex, isn't that too difficult to do ? 

Yes it is complex! Specially when you are in real sales situation. Clients don't give you the answers that you would expect. It will always surprise you and beside that you should really carefully listen. So maintaining such a flow of complex approach is really difficult. However you need a system, if it is well documented, and you do train, you can maintain this structural approach and you know what follows next. 

Of course with the right coaching, it is definitely worth it. Just imagine, if our price is being attacked and be lowering for 10%, this might be half or more of our earnings. We are throwing all that money that our company need to develop our marketing, sales, to develop our R&D or various other functions, we throw most of that out of the window because we don't know why they should pay so much. So investing in such approach and also training and coaching, so that all sellers are comfortable in executing this in a proper manner, is definitely worth the investment.

You meant investing in sales, how much that that mean ?

As I siad before, it is important to convince seller that they would need to change, so they want to change, however it is not that difficult. Showing them that they can't meet their targets and this being enough for them to want to be better, often doesn't work, for some yes for some no. Also the bonus schemes, insenti programs with some sellers work with some don't. In this difficult times sometimes targets are simply considered too exaggerated too ambitious, and in very moment seller thinks that he tends to get demotivated and not feeling to get responsible for improving them performance. 

So I would suggest you discuss with your sellers also strategic thinks, like what is happening in the market place, that the situation is more and more competitive and that sellers simply have to adjust, they have to talk with customers more, they have to understand buyers and them situations in general, in order to be successful next year and the years after, whoever is leding in their sales approaches has a very difficult future agreed of them, so sellers should also make sure that they stay competitive.

Blaž Mertelj

Managing Director, 

Senior Consultant

Should sales people be problem solvers or problem builders?

The conventional view of a successful “solution sales” person is as a problem solver. But that traditional perspective is being questioned in a number of quarters, not least because of the research that underpinned the publication of “The Challenger Sale”.

The fact that you have a solution to your prospect’s “problem” is probably irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, even if what you have to offer is - by whatever questionable criteria you might choose to apply - the “best” solution available. 

Your prospects can't afford to solve all their problems

Given half a chance, your prospects will always be able to identify more problems, issues or opportunities than they can possibly have the resources to deal with. So identifying a problem and offering a suitably qualified solution isn’t enough.

Before you stand a chance of winning the prospect’s business, you need to help them to the conclusion that the problem is worth solving and - here’s the really important part - that it is more important to solve that problem than all the others that are clamouring for their attention.

Shine a light on that problem!

So being a good problem solver isn’t enough. Really successful sales people are problem builders. Often they are even problem creators or (at least) illuminators. They know how to elevate the importance of getting a problem solved in the prospect’s mind.

And if they can’t, they are smart enough to qualify out or at least to recognise that there’s a lot of work to be done to educate the prospect on the need for change, and on the costs, risks and consequences of sticking with the status quo.

Tell them something they don't know

I just referred to “problem creators or illuminators”, and it’s probably worth explaining what I mean. Research by the CEB and others has powerfully validated the idea that drawing a prospect’s attention to a previously unrecognised issue, or giving them a fresh perspective on an already recognised problem is much more likely to lead to sales success than the traditional problem-solving solution-selling approach.

In the cut and thrust of the traditional solution-selling world, you need to out-execute all the other solution sellers from all the other competitors in order to win the recommendation, and even then, for the reasons I’ve highlighted above, you may not win the business.

What problem-builder sales people (the CEB identifies them as “Challengers”) do is to develop the problem - and its consequences - to the point where the prospect concludes that they simply have to do something.

Passing the WIIFM test

If you are the sales person that has led them towards that conclusion, it’s clear - and borne out by results in the field - that you’re much more likely to achieve a positive outcome.

By the way, it’s not just your champion you need to persuade. You also need to convince all the other vested stakeholder interests in the prospect organisation that this issue takes precedence over their pet projects as well.

You’ve got to find ways of anticipating and answering the “what’s in it for me (and my department, and the company)” question for all the relevant stakeholders. You can absolutely count on the fact that a number of them are going to ask something along the lines of “tell me again why need to do this?”, and you (and your sponsor) had better have a compelling answer.

The essence of selling = change management

Sales is an exercise in change management. You need to help your prospect answer “why change” and “why now” before explaining “why change to you”. And you had better be spending way more time on those first two questions than a conventional solution sales person might, because you can count on the fact that those are the areas where the really significant discussions are taking place inside the prospect.

Have you built a strong enough case for change?

If you’re a salesperson, I encourage you to ask the following question, honestly and rationally, of your top 10 deals: “have I really done all that I could to build the case for change within my prospect?”

And if you're a sales leader, dependent on your team’s performance to hit your numbers in this and future quarters, I’d be really nervous if I felt I didn’t know that my sales people knew the answers to those questions, and were doing something about them.

Top sales people aren’t just problem builders - they are also, by and large, superb storytellers.

References

Apollo B. (2013). Inflexion-Points: Smart Ideas for Accelerating Revenue Growth. Should sales people be problem solvers or problem builders? Retrieved June 12, 2013 from http://www.inflexion-point.com/Blog/bid/94647/Should-sales-people-be-problem-solvers-or-problem-builders.

Tamara Ćetković

Consultant, Coach & Project Manager