Think Forward, Sell Backward

When you’re selling a differentiated product or service, you need to think about it forward, but sell it backward.

Think forward

Think forward simply means that you figure out how it’s going to help your customer in a linear fashion going forward. First, you identify your differentiators, determine how they will impact the customer’s business operations and processes, and then calculate the business and financial benefit.

Differentiators

Brainstorm what sets you apart from competing alternatives, including status quo. But you need to take a broad view of your differentiators and consider your complete offering. Too many salespeople focus only on the actual product differentiators, which is why I often hear them bemoaning the fact that theirs is a commodity. To which I reply: there is no such thing as a commodity. If you consider things such as packaging, delivery reliability, financing, convenience, durability, consistency, contract terms, your company’s financial strength, customer service, order size, time to implement, training, you can always find at least one edge to cut into commodity thinking.

Process Impact

A differentiator is only relevant to the customer if it affects their ground level operations in some way, so the obvious question to ask about each differentiator is SO WHAT? Every business conducts operations and processes in order to deliver value to their customers, and they are always happy to consider ways to improve them. There are four general types of improvements you can make, all of which fall under the acronym POCR (I call them POCR chips): problems to be solved, opportunities to exploit, changes to adapt to, and risks to mitigate. In a sense, you’re figuring out the actual physical impact, which moves the needle of one or more important process metrics, such as time, labor, throughput, yield, quality, etc.

Business Impact

With the “So What?” figured out, the next two questions are “How much?” and “Who cares?”. In other words, what’s the business and financial impact and who benefits from those? Financial impacts broadly fall into three buckets: revenues, costs, and asset efficiency. Additional business impacts include risk reduction, strategic impact, and personal satisfaction. This is the language you need to be comfortable with when speaking at top decision making levels, and it’s especially important when you’re selling a solution that is new enough to make possible disruptive change.

Sell backward

Once you have the broad outlines of your value figured out, your selling task is to get the customer’s agreement about it. But you can’t do it in the same forward linear fashion, for two reasons. First, jaded customers tend to tune out of product-first pitches, so you’ll be on the wrong foot from the start. Second, your analysis probably has a lot of holes in it, because until you talk to a customer and understand their particular situation, you won’t have the actual numbers. By asking questions to fill in the numbers, you get the customer involved in your thinking process and end up with credible numbers.

The solution is to structure your conversation or presentation backwards. Start with a discussion of their business goals and needs, then work backwards to get agreement on the process changes they need to make to achieve those goals. Once you have that, that’s when you talk about the specific differentiator that makes it possible. The most effective structure for backwards selling is the standard story structure: situation, conflict, and resolution. If you’re delivering a presentation, it’s a great narrative structure to pull them along, or if it’s a dialogue, you can order your questions to get them to tell you the story you want them to hear.

As I’ve said before, leave the product in the car. The best possible outcome, and I know it’s possible because I’ve done it a few times myself, is when the customer agrees to do business—and you have not even talked about the product at all. That’s the beauty of thinking forward and selling backward.