Creating tension in some sales calls will actually improve your results

Customers in B2B markets buy your solutions to fix their problems or achieve specific business goals.  Whether they buy from you, or your competition, or not make any decision to buy at all, to a very large extent will depend on you.  Surprising as it may sound, customer’s experience of the sales/buying process drives more sales than company branding and reputation.  Sales people are still the biggest influence on customer’s decision to buy or not.  In a recent survey of B2B markets, company branding, products and services, value-to-price ratio, accounted for only 47% of customer loyalty.  A massive 53% was attributed to the purchase experience. 

Providing value to customer conversations is arguably the most powerful weapon sales professionals have that drives B2B customer loyalty.  What sets the best suppliers apart is not the quality of their products, but the value of their insights – new ideas that help customers either make money or save money in ways they didn’t even know were possible.

 Excellent sales people are not only able to create ‘value conversations’ with their customers, but also understand the importance of creating momentum in the sales process – momentum that enables them to achieve goals with more certainty than the average sales person.  The value of the insights you bring to the customer puts you in a stronger position to ask for things that moves the sale forward.

Creating momentum in the sale ensures you stay in the front of customer’s minds and you stay out of “no-decision land”.  However, it also means setting challenging objectives for each sales call and not giving in the first time there is push back from the customer.  For sales professional that have built their career around relationship selling, this may pose some challenge in itself.  Why?  Because relationship sales people like to keep the customer relationship on an even keel and are more likely to acquiesce when the customer pushes back.  Being assertive takes practice and planning.

Research has shown that sales professionals that plan sales calls effectively and know how to be appropriately assertive have performance levels almost double that of their colleagues. 

Sales professionals naturally seek closure.  Like most people, they are fundamentally uncomfortable with ambiguity, and seek closure in uncomfortable situations.  However, star sales performers know that in order to achieve the objectives set for the sales call, you need to deal with uncomfortable situations and use the tension it creates to your advantage.  If you’re ‘value conversation’ has the potential to make the customer money or save them money, it’s reasonable to expect movement forward in the sale/buying cycle.

Admittedly, this is a tough barrier to overcome. It isn’t realistic to expect sales people who do not like tension and ambiguity to suddenly start liking these things.  While you can’t realistically change human behaviour, you can help make sales people aware of their natural tendencies and give them some practical tools for making sure that they don’t prematurely cave in when it comes to intense value discussions.

Coaching Sales People the best ROI you can get.

·         Research shows that no other productivity investment comes close to coaching in improving the performance of sales professionals. 

o    19% increase in sales performance (Harvard Business School)

o    56% increase in customer loyalty (Gallup)

o    27% increase in ROI (Gallup)

·         If you don’t have a set of principles that moves your sales people forward so they can achieve greater results, then what is it you are managing? You’re managing the status quo.

·         You cannot grow with what you already have. Breakthrough requires tapping into new wisdom, additional information, and getting out of your own head. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself recycling the same level of knowledge and insight you already posses.

What is Effective Sales Coaching?

Not all sales professionals who receive coaching, even by good sales coaches, will do better. Research shows that coaching can be almost worthless when it targets the wrong people. Unfortunately, many sales managers target the wrong individuals in their team for coaching and don’t therefore get back what they had hoped for.

Sometimes, company guidelines dictate that all subordinates need to be coached. At other times, perhaps unwittingly, sales managers will often target their coaching towards the “tails” – their top performers and their bottom performers. They engage with their bottom performers in the belief that improving their sales performance will dramatically increase the potential of reaching territory or team goals. They engage with their top performers because, well, it’s more fun and they don’t want to ignore the “cream of the crop.” Those responsible for setting company guidelines may well take the view that all sales individuals need to be coached in the belief that improving the sales performance right across the board will increase results.

However, “…data shows that both managers’ coaching tendencies, and companies’ response, are misguided.” (The Dirty Secrets of Effective Sales Coaching, Harvard Business Publishing).  Harvard’s research involved thousands of sales individuals and they found that coaching (even world-class coaching) had a “marginal impact” on either the bottom or top performers.

It’s instinctive to believe that by focusing coaching on bottom performers it would pay off, since the only way is up! However, the Harvard research showed that actually this isn’t the case. If you think about it, individual contributors such as sales professionals that are performing that badly, indicates there is something quite wrong. It would be better to find the underlying cause of this because coaching may not fix this.

When it comes to star performers at the other end of your performance scale, coaching is likely to have little impact here also.  Of course, paying special attention to top performers does have worth while retention benefits, and employee’s that are ‘engagement’ will often ‘go that extra mile’ for the organisation.

The article, “The Dirty Secrets of Effective Sales Coaching” concludes that it’s the middle 60%, the core performers, were the real benefits of coaching pay off. “For this group, the best-quality coaching can improve performance up to 19% (percentage of quota attained).”  Even modest improvements in sales performance in single figures across 50% of the sales force can mean the difference between hitting or missing targets.    

What discipline do you use in your sales organisation to ensure your people have developed and can maintain the mindset of a champion? 

Realpoint Consulting | www.real-point.co.uk 

Is Your Customer Conversation Setting You Apart from your Competition?

The phrase that we always heard in the world of digital signage and screen-media not all that long ago was “Content is King”. Indeed, content is still very important but, the messaging has changed.  Technology is ever marching on and marketers are always searching for the higher ground, where their latest technology and collaborative partnerships are breaking new milestones.  This is certainly the case where screens, software, and content come together.  There seems to be a real thirst for exciting and engaging interactions with screens of all shapes and sizes from huge video walls to mobile phones.  The applications coming on stream are really innovative. 

Rather than “Content is King”, the words you are more likely to hear and read now when marketers talk about their technology applications are “Engaging”, “Exciting”, Creative”.  Are these adjectives related to Content is King?  Of course they are! But, the market for digital signage and screen-based marketing has developed, and marketers are using messaging that’s reflecting a consumer or customer centric approach to their technologies and applications. After all, don’t we all want to be engaged and excited when we come to buy things? 

However, I’d like to draw you back to the adjectives we used earlier – Exciting, Engaging, Creative.  While you are thinking about these words, also think about the way you go about selling your product or application to your customer.  

Your Customer Conversation is Important – Why?

Customers are looking for something beyond a sales pitch and want problem solving skills and value-based conversations. Customers aren’t really interested in your company (believe it or not).  They are interested is what you can do for them, such as helping to capture market share, creating opportunities, improving sales results, etc.  When sales people start a new customer relationship by talking about themselves, their credentials as a worthy supplier or partner, their global reach, their great product features, etc, they fall into the trap of corporate inertia. The problem with this approach is that it’s all about you and not about the customer.  This keeps you moving in the same direction as everyone else. 

Who is the central character here?  It’s you, and the assumption is that if your customer knew as much about your company as you, they would buy from you.  The problem you face is that so many other companies sell this way and you don’t stand out as being different. So, it’s important to translate your company ‘speak’ into a conversation that involves your customer.

A great customer conversation manages to create a different dynamic.  Your customers are looking for you to tell them something that they don’t already know, or even about a problem that they didn’t know they had. 

Context Makes Your Customer Care

So, what’s the problem with leading with the strengths of your company, product or service?  The problem is that your customer isn’t ready to hear about them yet.  They have no frame of reference to put those strengths of yours into a situation that they feel is uniquely theirs.  Your customer’s predisposition is to assume that all competitors are the same, and they do not want to have to change what they are doing.  So, you need to create a sense of urgency around your solution, and this is accomplished by establishing a context that turns a seemingly innocuous capability into something that they believe they can’t live without.

As a way of illustrating this it’s somewhat like an everyday event in the seaside town where my grandparents lived. I would spend most of my summer holidays there as a child.  Everyday a siren would sound at lunch time in a nearby factory.  It was quite loud and the whole small town would hear it.  However, it was an everyday event and nobody took much notice (apart from those at the factory looking forward to lunch time). However, the same siren that signalled lunch time at the factory was also used to signal the lifeboat men to an emergency at sea.  The siren would sound for a longer period; however, it was the same siren using the exact same sound that led to a different reaction depending on the context.

This is the principle with the sales conversation with your customer.  You need to establish the right context to create urgency.  It’s not your product or service that makes your customer care.  It’s the changing context that makes it meaningful and gets the customer to consider doing something different.

Engaging, Exciting, & Creative - Creating the WoW factor

Getting back to my point, terms like engaging, exciting, and creative are bywords in the world of digital media and help to describe what we aim to achieve with our products and services.  We should at the very least ensure our customer conversations are also engaging, exciting, and creative.  I’m not talking about the clever graphics or latest technology you use, all of your competitors will be using these as well.  I am talking about the behaviour you exhibit in front of customers and the conversation between you and your customer that tells them you are different from all the others they have talked to and can see real value in keeping the conversation going. 

When presenting material there are various techniques you can use to keep the attention of your customer, we call these ‘grabbers’ and they are intended to ‘spike’ the engagement so that you keep your customer’s attention high throughout.  However, the single most powerful tip I have to help you create the WoW factor and create a unique position for yourself is this: Value lies in the contrast between what your customer has now and what they can achieve with your product or service.  

Conversations that show contrast are very powerful and when they are done properly are very engaging, exciting, and creative in their execution and story telling.  The key lies in showing the contract between your customer’s current position and the gain associated with your solution.

Conversations like this have three basic elements:

1.       Challenge/Pain or unfulfilled Opportunity

2.       Sufficient gain from your solution

3.       Proof that what you claim is actually true

This is interesting.  Think about how hard you work to prove claims today.  You no doubt look at and give third party information in support of your claims.  You may do to proof of concepts and pilots.  You set up site visits or invest in demonstration centres. These are all very well, but are expensive and will lengthen sales cycles.

What great sales champions understand is that well told customer conversations with contrast and proof points are worth more than all these alternative points of data put together.

Want to improve Sales Effectiveness - look at your sales processes

Aberdeen Group examined 422 organisation’s sales effectiveness and found that some companies achieved an average 83% accuracy in their sales forecasts compared with just 67% for sales teams in other companies. Aberdeen stated that sales forecasting and analytics solutions and their daily use in sales teams play a crucial role in maintaining higher accuracy percentiles.

The report revealed that leading companies have been able to turn this into profit by:

• Increasing overall team attainment of quota by 12.6% ; compared with 2.3% decrease for other companies
• 9.1% average year-over-year increase in annual gross revenue per sales person; compared to a 1.5% decrease for other companies

Source:Aberdeen Group “Sales Forecasting: Analytics to the Rescue”

The effect poor sales forecasting has on business performance
Sales Forecasting tools are used to insert structure and rigor into what is often no more than a degree away from a best guess forecast of sales opportunities. Too many sales managers spend an incredible amount of time, energy and effort at the end of each quarter working with their sales people to close deals that their forecasts indicate should be closed. This push for closing business late in the quarter often results in higher levels of discounting, commitments to service levels beyond the norm or unusual payment terms, all of which have a negative impact on revenue, cash flow and profitability.

The key to eliminating these issues lies in improving the process and using the subsequent insights or business intelligence gained from the tools used to achieve this.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems in themselves don’t provide the answer to poor sales forecasting and the related poor business performance. Most organisations have developed some form of sales “process” that might look something like this:

CRM systems have been deployed to track sales opportunities as they move through the various stages in a sale (in some cases CRM’s also manage the documentation and activities related to specific opportunities in the pipeline). The focus is on the sales person - what your sales people needs to do keep the opportunity moving forward to a position where it is closed. Herein lays the key problem: CRM system takes little or no account of what your customer needs to do for you to consider the opportunity having moved forward. It’s therefore very likely that your sales people complete all the steps outlined in your CRM to consider themselves in the “Closing” stage of your sales process, only to subsequently find out that the customer is till back in some early stage of say “impact analysis” and your sales team had no idea.

Closing the Gap
You can’t eliminate every surprise during the sales cycle, but you can minimize the impact of such surprises by anticipating and identifying the potential for them earlier and responding faster. AS a minimum, this involves creating a sales process that embodies the following fundamental capabilities:

Introduce metrics that indicate alignment between the sales and buying process. The key here is that you assign definitive checkpoints of achievement which are measurable by specific and indisputable outcomes that have been done jointly with the customer, or are easily witnessed and validated by your sales teams. To be effective, these checkpoints and verifiable outcomes cannot be just about the customer, but instead must involve the customer. Using checkpoints and verifiable outcomes allows you to effectively measure and, subsequently, manage your progress, making the sales forecast more accurate because it has achieved a certain status (a checkpoint status) instead of being at a certain stage (e.g. somewhere in “negotiation”). Categorizing an opportunity that’s in the ‘negotiation stage’ as “80% likely to close” is a risky venture in forecasting as the “probability of close” isn’t really associated with where the sales person has placed it in their forecast… it’s all about where the customer is in their readiness to place the order.

Provide global continuity with local flexibility. Selling in Mumbai or Beijing is different from selling in London or Amsterdam. While there are legitimate cultural reasons for selling differently, it shouldn’t be at the expense of a predictable forecast. Your process should allow the flexibility to be tailored by geography or line of business, but also serve as a consistent framework for forecasting and monitoring progress.

Opportunity Risk Assessment. Just as a GPS can tell you with pinpoint precision where you are relative to your destination, Opportunity Risk Assessment can tell you where you are relative to your checkpoint milestones. Conducting a quick review of the specific Verifiable Outcomes allows you to identify specific risk so that you can adjust your sales activities as appropriate to correct your course of action This is the roadmap for sales management to coach sales professionals on what activities need to take place to advance each opportunity and provides the necessary data to create a predictable forecast.

The Guesswork diminishes and the payoff is huge.
When your sales professionals understand the process, they can easily identify tasks and action items, understand the risks that they face and make more accurate forecast commitments. Your sales team will know exactly what they have to do to move an opportunity forward and have confidence that these actions support advancing the opportunity and improving the probability of closing the deal as forecast.

From a sales management perspective, there is also a much higher level of confidence in the numbers and the levels of performance being committed to the executive team. Sales managers are able to pinpoint the problems and risks earlier, minimizing surprises that may occur late in the sales cycle. It also helps managers to better assess and understand the needs of the individuals on the team so the team can be appropriately coached.

For your executive team, more consistent and reliable forecasts enable accurate exception setting with shareholders, managers, employees and market analysts. It also provides better visibility into sources of revenue production and potential revenue challenges.
And, of course, to a customer, a supplier who is synchronised with their buying process, working alongside them at the customer’s pace, raises the customer’s confidence level that the seller will remain a strong and reliable partner.

The Sales Playbook: how it adds value in customer conversations

The individual sales person is still the single most important resource you have to distinguish your product or service, your company, and your offer as different from everyone else. Customers are not looking for great sales presentations from their account managers or sales contacts, what they are really seek is value through consultative and problem solving skills, with need-based conversations instead of sales pitches. How your customer facing people converse with customers over these issues will either set you apart from your competition, or make you sound just like them.


I’m not talking about understanding how they should be using their soft skills in interacting with customers, although this is a good start, I’m really talking about the sales messages they give to customers about who you are as a company or organization and how you are going to help them reach their business goals. To some extent is about taking the marketing messages you create about your brand, products, services, etc., and converting these into appropriate and timely selling messages that align to customer’s problems and opportunities at each stage of the sales process.


Improving the “customer conversation” is the key link that sets you apart in today’s highly competitive markets. If you’re in a market that has lots of competition and similar products or services, you would be right is assuming that it’s not what you sell that important, but how you sell that matters. Sales experts say it’s not about where you show up (a reference to marketing-based leads) it’s about what you say when you get there that really matters. Driving brand, products, or services messages from the company head office level down through the sales people and sales channels is what separates consistently great results from mediocre results, and it’s where companies should focus their efforts in their search for competitive difference.


One of the sales tools that should be used more often than it is, is the sales playbook. The reason sales playbooks are not used as much as they should may be down to plain ignorance, or more likely, because there is a disconnect between marketing and sales, neither one accepting responsibility. Marketing continue to push out corporate messages, and sales people continue to modify those messages to suit their own situations. There are a number of problems with this:

• Marketing budget is wasted because sales aren’t using the material they churn out

• Messages given to customers are not consistent across the organization

• Missed opportunity to learn sales best practices from your top performers

The Value of Sales Playbooks in Customer Conversations


There are at least five issues where sales playbooks can significantly improve customer conversations and increase selling effectiveness. As you read these descriptions, imagine where you and your company might be struggling, and begin to prioritise the key areas that you want to change.


1. Build compelling, relevant explanations into your sales playbooks
The amount of information that your customers or potential customers have to work through to help them make business decisions is enormous. When they meet with sales people a see and hear the same stuff over and over again, it’s no wonder they have a hard time differentiating your subtle and esoteric product or service feature arguments from those of your competition. That fact is, when customers are unable to clearly distinguish one supplier offer from the next, they will base their decision on price.


Create clear value propositions by:

Ensuring everyone in your company shares a common understanding of what constitutes a differentiated value proposition.

Establish a shared structure and approach for creating value propositions that can be used by your sales people in customer meetings. These need to distinguish your offer, and help customers see the value of your solutions.

Develop your value proposition with the customer’s context in mind, not your own company or product context. What is it that your customer needs to do the reach their business goals and how can your products or services help them? Create value rather than inferring benefits from features and functions.


2. Customer needs analysis
Creating a truly customer-focused sales approach requires that you proactively identify your target customers’ key business drivers, and then map your corresponding capabilities as a “best fit” to solving those needs. You should systematically construct solution scenarios for target customers based on their real business needs, and then connect your most appropriate capabilities to build a solution from the customer’s perspective.


3. Before and after scenarios
Show what life is like for your customer without your solution, then demonstrate how much better things will be with your solution. If you've correctly analyzed the business issues, this comparison can be remarkably effective.


4. Sales best practice in customer conversations
Ask your top performers about what they do and say that makes them stand out. What questions do they ask, how do they ask them and what are they trying to achieve in doing so. What information do they give and at what stage in the sales process. Find out how they handle objections. Document all the potential scenarios and have these set out in the sales playbook so everyone can learn and benefit. It will take time and effort, but it’s worth it to gain superior top and bottom line results.


5. Analyse what your competitors say
This analysis should emphasize positioning issues, not just technical features. You should look at how competitors position themselves in the market and how they think about business issues. Also, find out what customers and resellers think about how you're positioned against the competition.


Think of the sales playbook as a toolkit. It's a great place to bring together reference information, FAQs, contract templates, pricing, training materials, presentations, contact information, and anything else that sales people are likely to need.

Once you have sales playbooks in place, they will be a great tool that sales people can use to plan sales calls, refresh ideas just prior to meeting customers, handle objections effectively, keep sales opportunities progressing forward. They can also be used as part of the onboarding process for new sales talent

Sales Playbooks - How do they work?

The use of 'Playbooks' originates in sports (particularly basketball) where winning set plays are described and played-out so that players can practice the tactics between themselves. This concept is making rapid growth in sales and can have a dramatic effect on sales performance overall. Traditionally, sales professionals have been given standardised 'how to sell' training along with company collateral (brochures, white papers, etc.) However, what is lacking is link between specific customer needs and the products and technology they're selling.

A sales playbook captures a company's knowledge about it's market, value proposition, product solutions, competition, and best practices. It's a document that takes a lot of research and input from the sales force, particularly the top performers. To be effective, the playbook needs to be written by someone who understands business issues and sales methodologies, it's not a project for junior marcom people.

Although there are no specific rules on what should be in a playbook, there are nevertheless some key ingredients:

• Customer analysis: key segments, buyers and influencers, their motivations. What is it your customer is really looking to achieve and why - what are the business issue/s involved?
• Your value proposition: how do your products and services link directly to the customer's business issue/s. It's important to get a consistent message across, to make sure everyone in the company is on the same page.
• A clear technology explanation: the playbook should provide a solid business-orientated explanation of your technology solution, so that sales people can explain clearly how their products support the value proposition. Diagrams and charts are useful. However, do not load the playbook with heavy technology discussions.
• Before and after scenarios: show what life is like for your customer without your solution, then demonstrate how much better things will be with your solution. If you have correctly analysed the business issues, this comparison can be remarkably effective.
• Competitive analysis: this analysis should emphasize positioning issues, not just technical features. You should look at how competitors position themselves in the market and how they approach these business issues. It's also a really good idea to try and find out what your customers and resellers/partners think about how you're positioned against the competition.
• Sales methodology: here you want to describe all of the steps you go through to make a sale. The information you collect at each point, how you handle objections, who gets involved in the flow. Often, having to describe the sales process in detail like this will uncover a few holes in how things are down. Deciding how to fix process problems can be one of the toughest challenges in building a playbook.
• Best practice: ask your top performers about what works and what doesn't. You will be surprised at the tips and techniques that crop up.

Gaining commitment in solution sales

When we think about gaining commitment from customers we may just think about what the customer has to go through at the end of the sales process to raise the purchase order. Indeed, this is an important process to understand and one that shouldn’t be underestimated. However, so many sales opportunities start off OK but either never progress beyond the early or mid stages, or get stuck somewhere in the pipeline and no one really understands why. Some sales opportunities change mid way through the sales cycle and may disappear altogether. This can happen when business objectives change, budget is re-allocated to other projects, new people are hired and things get put on hold, etc. When something like this happens to our sales opportunities, the sooner we get to know what’s causing this to happen, the quicker we can do something about it.

What we would like to see are sales opportunities that move steadily through our sales pipeline, progressing every time we speak or meet with the customer to our ultimate goal of purchase orders. However, without a rigorous structure around our sales methods, we are going to be frustrated when deals don’t progress as we would like. One area we can look at immediately that will help us gain commitment from our prospects or customers as we progress through the sales cycle are – advances vs continuations!

Advances vs Continuations

Neil Rackham in his book SPIN Selling talks about defining call success in larger sales. He describes a sales call that advances the sale forwards towards a decision, and one that fails to achieve this. The terminology he uses is: advances and continuations. In their meetings with customers, Neil Rackham recommends sales people become dissatisfied with call objectives that only result in a continuation (where the sale will continue but no specific action has been agreed with the customer to move it forward). Instead, set objective/s where the customer has to commit to some form of action which moves the sale forwards towards a decision.

Examples of advances are:

o A customer’s agreement to attend an off-site demonstration
o Clearance which will get you in front of a higher level of decision maker
o Agreement to run a trial or test your product
o Access to parts of the account which were previously inaccessible to you

Examples of continuations are:

o ‘Thank you for coming, why don’t you visit us next time you’re in the area.’
o ‘Fantastic presentation, we’re very impressed. Let’s meet again some time.’
o ‘We liked what we saw and we’ll be in touch if we need to take things further.’

In none of the last three ‘continuations’ has the customer agreed to a specific action, so there’s no concrete sign that the call has caused the sale to move forward.

On the other hand, an advance is a commitment proposed that is the highest realistic commitment that the customer is able to give. It has to be realistic, there’s no point in proposing a commitment that the customer finds is beyond what they are able to do, given where you are in the sales cycle.

Buying Resistance

If you find customers (or prospects) are reluctant to accept or act on the commitment proposed (advance), then it’s unlikely the sale will progress the way you would want. It may even stall completely if you don’t understand why you are getting some push back. The reason for push back may simply be that you are over optimistic in where you really are in the sales cycle and the advance is one that is too high for your customer to accept at this stage. If this is the case, then some push back is to be expected and your advance may need to be revised. Be prepared, have an alternative proposed advance in your back pocket, one that is acceptable for you but allows your customer to feel it’s not a stretch to far for them. The key idea is to have some action your customer has to commit to so that they are still engaged in the process and you have the confidence of knowing that they are still interested in your proposal.

However, what do you do when your proposed commitment is rejected or simply not acted upon, and/or there are continual objections from your customer? Buying resistance is evident when any of these symptoms arise. It also worth looking out for ‘bad day’ behaviour patterns such as being: argumentative, nitpick questioning, passively resisting, overly challenging. Your objective has to be to find out what’s causing the resistance in the first place and then deal with it. It could be due to something related to you – such as your proposal, your company, you personally. Or it could be something going on inside your customer’s organisation you are not aware of, or your contact/s does not see and win/win for them. Bye the way, if they don’t see a win/win, then the only options are: win/lose; lose/win; or lose/lose. In any event you need to find out what’s causing the reluctance to accept your proposed commitment before you can logically move on in the sale.