Winning the Competition for Corporate Funds

In this article, Part II or my three part series, I shall share with you an approach that, after over 20 years in enterprise sales (including a start at IBM), I know will work, provided you apply it in a consistent manner. The approach I am about to describe can ensure success to any company with decent (i.e., not necessarily exceptional) product offerings in a relevant product or service category (i.e., not necessarily a recognized hot category). Furthermore, I will make the following assertion: Unless your company is a bona fide leader in an established, growing product category, every time you lead with your product (as most software vendors still do), I can assure you that you are likely to fail in today's market.

With this approach, I recommend - “Provocation-based Selling.”

In this section, I want to cover three topics related to the hand-to-hand combat required for high-tech sales teams and executives to close deals:

1. What do you say to the 'big dog' to get them interested in your potential solution?
2. What are the main priorities for marketing to support the field?
3. How do you take account of the differing interests of the target various constituencies you must deal with in typical enterprise-level sales cycles?

Sales Process Model

Selling complex solutions into an emerging market means selling services-led offers, where consulting and systems integration, both from the lead vendor and from its partners, help to back fill what is as yet an incomplete product offering. And, in order to 'cross the chasm' into a first mainstream market, the target customer is likely to be a line-of-business executive or manager responsible for solving critical business problems through the use of IT solutions. In this model, it is critical to establish deep lines of communication with the customer to set their expectations and gain their support. This, in turn, requires a very different sales model from that of selling an established product. Here is the model for selling emerging solutions:

1. Get a personal introduction to the line-of-business executive. Everyone knows to call high, but high people have elaborate defense mechanisms to keep salespeople out. The only reliable way to get past these defenses is by way of a personal introduction. Delegate this problem upward into the organization until someone knows someone who can pave the way. Before getting the introduction, it is fine to meet with lesser-ranking people in the organization to gather intelligence, but the sales cycle does not formally begin until this meeting. I use LinkedIn almost every day.  LinkedIn is the social channel to be if you want to network and connect with other professionals to find business opportunities, both personally and B2B partnerships. You may connect with me here on LinkedIn.
2. Research the company and bring a provocation to the meeting. Identify what you expect will be a major concern of the executive and present a thought-provoking point of view. Your goal is to engage an executive who does not know you in a serious dialog and to evoke some level of anxiety in them to solve the specific problem you are there to discuss. You cannot afford to play safe as this will look like you are wasting their time; after all, when the executive agreed to the meeting, they did so in the hope of getting some special insight as to how to address their problem. Therefore, it is critical to show your appreciation for the problems they face. It also makes sense to take a senior executive along to the meeting, to establish a multi-level relationship early on. When I attend a first time meeting, I'm prepared to discuss 7-10 different provocations. Here are some examples: 
   • Are you getting enough qualified leads to reach sales projections?
   • Can you prove your campaign effectiveness and demonstrating marketing return on investment? In real-time?
   • Do you want to drive more website traffic?
   • Our sales and marketing expense is just too high for the revenue we're generating.
   • Can you predictably accelerate our revenue growth?
   • I know we can't cut our way to revenue growth, but we've got to improve the ROI before spending any more.
   • We need to increase our revenue per employee, and particularly our revenue per salesperson.
3. Capture their reaction to the provocation. If there is no reaction, retreat with dignity. Interestingly, this is the worst thing that can happen, so it's best to accept it and leave. If there is a negative reaction, you can explore deeper to get an understanding and seek common ground. This reaction can be the best one because it might indicate that you have hit a nerve. Use the tag team to handle this situation, with one of you thinking while the other is probing to find out the root-cause of the customer's adverse response. Above all, don't confront their reaction, as this may create a negative vibe that is difficult to recover from in future contacts with the customer. Finally, if there is a positive reaction, move on to discussing war stories.

4. Discuss war stories. These are not customer references - it is too early in the market's development to have many, or even any, of these - but instead are problems that the other companies in the industry are struggling with, and perhaps ones where the vendor is already at work trying to help. The point here is to position the company as having knowledgeable people who have seen the problems before and are bringing new technology to their solution. This also provides an opportunity to establish empathy early in the relationship.
5. Offer a diagnostic. Having positioned your people as knowledgeable, the vendor's first offer is to have them come in and take a look at the prospect's situation. This can be positioned as a mini-study for a fee or as the front end of a business proposal detailing a complete solution to the critical problem. In either case, the intent is to create a valuable deliverable for the line-of-business executive regardless of whether they purchase a product from them or not. In my case, I offer a FREE comprehensive gap analysis (marketing assessment). The assessment helps uncover problem areas and shows the low hanging fruit to help boost company performance and sales.
6. Use the diagnostic process to identify and engage with all the players in the buying process (see Section A above). This will allow you to discover a sponsor, determine who the power sponsor is, uncover much of your competition, learn about the in-house efforts that compete as well, and in general get the lay of the land. It is important to remember that this is like a passport into the organization to get up close and personal - more like a visa since it only lasts a short time - so the opportunity should be exploited for multiple purposes.

7. Draft - but be reluctant to submit - a sales proposal. As long as you are drafting the proposal, you have permission to go back to the organization for more information, during which you can do more selling. Once you submit it, you have to take your chances from there. Try to defer submittal until you are confident you have won the deal. Though this might feel counter-intuitive to sales teams and executives under pressure to make quota, this is a critical game to play at this stage of the relationship. One celebrated example of this tactic at work was Ross Perot's tactic of holding a 'pre-proposal review,' in which the vendor's executives and account team would present their proposal to the customer's executive team as a trial balloon to obtain their 'feedback.' If the customer showed that they were satisfied with the proposal and corroborating information, the Perot team would ask for the order then and there, and in this way, they almost never got to the formal 'proposal' stage. They always asked for the proposal documents to be returned before they left the meeting, on the realistic basis that once the proposal is submitted, all control over the decision process passes to the customer.
8. Construct the proposal in three phases. Phase One is what the vendor can deliver right away. It is normally heavily weighted toward services. Phase Two is what it can deliver within the year. This is normally built around the next release of the system. Phase Three is everything else the customer wants or needs which the vendor cannot supply within a year and which, hopefully, can be deferred. If they cannot be deferred, then the vendor must refer to a partner, even a competitor, to keep the relationship of trusted advisor.

Next week, I’ll drive into my final approach in Part III and discuss specific marketing activities to help marketing leaders support the sales force and boost sales. To make this sales process work, the field needs significant support in these four areas: (1) introductions to line-of-business executives; (2) provocation development and delivery; (3) war stories; and (4) and diagnostics. Each requires a program to develop. That wraps up part two of this three-part series.

So what did you think? I would love to hear your thoughts, so comment below and share this post!