Of the many thousands of sales presentations delivered daily, only a select few rise to the level of STRATEGIC sales presentations. What’s the difference?
Strategic sales presentations fit the following profile:
Game changers: Ordinary presentations are fine for ordinary decisions, such as renewing a contract with an existing supplier. Strategic presentations require important decisions, such as changing the way the customer does business to respond to fresh challenges, opportunities, or risks.
New insights: One way to make a presentation “game-changing” is for the salesperson to bring new insights to the client, perhaps about a problem they don’t realize they have. They challenge the client’s view of the world, and this requires a lot of research, and, yes, courage.
Impact: The impact of decisions made as the result of a strategic sales presentation is usually huge from a financial, strategic and even personal point of view. For the client, this means that many different units or functions are involved, which means that the message has to appeal to a wider range of interests. For the salesperson, the outcome may mean the difference between a successful year or a bust.
Unique: Ordinary presentations are usually canned scripts that use off-the-shelf slides and apply to everyone. They practically scream: “to whom it may concern.” Strategic presentations are unique to those people in the room at that particular time, for their particular situation.
Strategic context: Strategic presentations are not stand-alone events that can be plugged in whenever the client agrees to meet with you. They are an integral element of the salesperson’s account or opportunity plan, and therefore they have a clear purpose and intended outcome for the seller and the buyer.
Shaping the conditions: Because they are part of an ongoing strategy, what the salesperson does before the presentation to shape the conditions for success is at least as important as what he or she says and does during the presentation.
This may seem ironic and possibly self-defeating coming from someone who makes a living selling training to organizations, but if you’re in sales and depend on your employer to be the principal source of your sales education, you may be in serious trouble.
You can be a good salesperson with the training you get—maybe even very good. But you can’t be exceptional, and you definitely can’t be great, if you don’t take charge of your own education and lifelong learning. It’s pretty simple: if you’re getting training that your employer provides, so is everyone else.
I had an interesting discussion with Anthony Iannarino yesterday, and coincidentally his article this morning reinforced an idea that came into my mind during that discussion. We were talking about our shared passion for military history, and one of the points that came out of our talk is that most if not all of the great generals and leaders were self-taught. Marshall and Eisenhower and Patton were sent to professional schools throughout their careers, but they also read incessantly, and they studied military history, taking careful notes, visiting battlefields to see for themselves how and why those who came before them made the decisions that they did.
Salespeople also need to study their craft and their profession. When was the last time you read a sales book? If it was recently, don’t pat yourself on the back just yet. When was the last time you took careful notes, maybe compared what you read to a different book, and applied what you learned? And, it’s really not about just sales books. When was the last time you read a business book, or any other book that expanded your horizons just a little bit, maybe helped you to spot a new way to approach a particular sales opportunity?
When you attend a training class, does your workbook join all the others you have packed away somewhere gathering dust, or do you personally take charge of applying one or two or more nuggets? If you paid for a golf lesson, you know it would be wasted if you didn’t go out and practice the new skill immediately and consistently, yet so many salespeople treat the training they get as an event that is over when it is over.
We’re told the best salespeople bring fresh insights to their customers. Guess what: if everyone is getting the same training in those same ideas, how fresh are your insights going to be?
What does self-education do for you? It can make you better at your current position, but what it really does is prepare you for higher positions. It will give you the knowledge and confidence to interact with higher level people in the customer’s organization, or even in your own. It will mark you out for advancement. In the 1890s, British military officers posted to India led a relaxed life: a little training in the morning, polo in the late afternoons, and alcohol and naps during the hottest hours of the day. Except for one young subaltern, a recent graduate of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Knowing that his education was woefully deficient, the young officer sent his mother a shopping list of books, books which he studied during those afternoon hours when everyone else was boozing or sleeping. He didn’t let his studies get in the way of everything else that mattered; he was one of the stars of his regiment’s polo team, and he certainly was not a teetotaler, but Winston Churchill had other plans for his life, and he knew that he had to take charge of his own education if he was to rise above his ordinary career prospects.
Of course, the 1890s were different than today. At that time, the world was about to change dramatically in ways that people could not foresee. Change was the order of the day, although folks back then really did not know what was about to hit them. Today, change is still the order of the day, and the only difference is that we know that next year, or 10 years from now will be very different than today. So, we have even less excuse to avoid taking responsibility for our own education. As Tom Friedman says in today’s New York Times column, in today’s hyperconnected world, “…the old average is over.” Things you take for granted become obsolete faster, so what you learn early in your life and career is not enough to last your lifetime.
Does self-education matter? Hell, yes, it does! When everyone else has great products and slick materials, the only differentiator that you can control is your knowledge and skill, and that’s the differentiator that customers will pay to get. What are you doing to add value to yourself and your customers?
In the first two articles of this series, we addressed two major stumbling blocks to getting technical staff to sell: making it acceptable and accessible to them. In other words, showing them why it’s OK to “sell”, and why it’s not some mysterious skill that is beyond their capabilities. These first two steps can be seen as removing negatives; the final piece is to make appealing, so that they have positive reasons to actively be on the lookout for sales opportunities.
The following ideas, you will notice, actually apply to any change management initiative within an organization. When the change is substantive, it’s never enough to run an event, such as training, and then expect complete and lasting change. It has to be embedded into the fabric of the business, to use an elegant term suggested by my friend Dave Brock. In fact, I owe some of the specific points below to an enlightening conversation on this topic that I had with him this morning. (It’s hard to tease out the respective credit, but the parts that sound unusually cogent are most likely his.)
Make it part of the regular conversation. It’s one thing for managers to tell their technical staff that they should be alert for opportunities within their client accounts, but it’s quite another for those managers to include the topic on the agenda of their regular project management meetings, or to ask the questions that keep engineers focused just a little bit wider than their day jobs. On occasion, technical staff may be brought in to participate in account planning workshops. You won’t want to pull them away from their day jobs for all the meetings, of course, but it helps to remind them of the larger context that they are key contributors to.
Measure the right things. Ultimately, you tend to get what you inspect and what you pay for. You can measure new projects or opportunities, or heightened profitability in existing projects through change orders and scope extensions. Unfortunately, measurements and compensation can also distort performance and lead to unintended consequences, so you have to calibrate the measurements of observable behaviors carefully. For example, one such measure could be the number of referrals to members of the formal sales organization. It has to be a solid hand-off, in which the engineer uses her access to the right people to facilitate an introduction, but then there should also be a clear understanding that the salesperson takes the ball and runs with it from there, so that their engineering objectivity and integrity are kept intact. For the same reason, I’m uncomfortable with formal quotas—but there’s nothing wrong with making sales measurements a formal component of performance appraisals.
Compensate accordingly. It may seem hard to believe, but salespeople aren’t the only people who respond to incentives. Again, without subtracting from their performance of their core duties, you want to incentivize them for new projects and for profitability. Project managers on professional services contracts can be a crucial factor in the profitability of the project, so it pays to keep them attuned to it. Also, don’t forget that there are non-monetary ways to motivate people, such as giving credit and recognition where it is earned.
Finally, if you want engineers to have your back, make sure you have theirs. To paraphrase Kennedy: “Ask not what your engineers can do for you—ask what you can do for your engineers.” What can you on the sales side do to help make their jobs easier, such as use your influence at the right levels to manage difficult clients, or to avoid making unrealistic promises that they may be blamed for not fulfilling?
Part 1 of this series dealt with making selling acceptable by removing the “ick factor” about selling from the minds of engineers and technical staff. While that’s an essential start, it’s just as important to take the mystery out of the selling process for them. No one will enthusiastically jump into an activity that they don’t think they can succeed in. (In fact, I suspect that some of the high-minded criticism that engineers make about selling is meant to hide the fact that they’re afraid to try.)
There are three general points that will make selling more accessible and easier to grasp for technically-minded people who are new to it:
Sales is a process. While sales may not be as predictable as a physical system, in general all sales opportunities follow a pattern, in which specific inputs yield predictable outputs. The pattern is founded on how clients make decisions to invest in new solutions—they go through clear mental and organizational steps in becoming aware of needs, searching for solutions, deciding to act, etc. Processes can be codified, learned, and applied, and as I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, engineers and technical staff are frequently in closer daily contact with the client and thus better positioned to participate early in the process.
The sales conversation is an extension of a problem-solving discussion. The first way to make selling accessible to engineers builds off the point made in part 1 of this series: selling is about solving problems for customers. Engineers are good at finding and solving problems, so it’s not a huge leap from what they’re already doing. They find problems by first, asking questions about what the client wants to achieve, and what’s working and what’s not; second, by diagnosing the problem and finally by recommending a solution. So far, that’s exactly what consultative salespeople do. Where they go further is in asking questions to bring out the cost or impact of the problem, which increases urgency to solve it, and in getting the client involved in suggesting the logical solution. This type of questioning, of course, is just another process that can be learned.
Sales is not just for extraverts. You don’t have to be loud, gregarious, and attention-seeking to succeed in sales. In fact, for complex systems sales too much extraversion can be a disadvantage. While being too introverted can definitely hurt, introverts tend to be better at asking questions, listening and analysis, and these are key skills for complex sales. I’ve written about this before, but soon-to-be-released research highlighted by Dan Pink in To Sell Is Human shows that actual sales performance (not just peer perceptions) is turned in by those who are in the middle of the scale—the ambiverts, if you will.
So far, we’ve talked about how to make selling acceptable, and if you provide training and guidance to your engineering staff in these sales processes, you will make selling accessible. The final step is to provide the environment and incentives to make it appealing, which is the topic for part 3.
shows that actual sales performance (not just peer perceptions) is turned in by those who are in the middle of the scale—the ambiverts, if you will.
