I remember an old spoof from the cartoons: the character is listening to the radio and an ad comes on.
Announcer: “I’m talking to YOU!”
Character: “Me?”
Announcer: “Yes, YOU, Elmer Snodgrass of 123 Elm Street; I’m talking to YOU!”
When I was a kid, I thought it was pretty cool that the radio could speak directly to each person in that way. I’ve become more sophisticated since then, but I still have the perhaps naïve impression that salespeople can strive for the same effect.
Have you ever received a Valentine’s Day card that addressed, “To whom it may concern?” Maybe not in so many words, but I’m sure you’ve received cards that were so impersonal that they were totally meaningless—they may even defeat the purpose.
The same thought applies to value propositions that salespeople tell their prospects; they’re usually so generic that all the meaning and interest has been leached out of them. They come across as a required formality, filled with platitudes and one-size-fits-all generalities.
I recently received an email in which the first line was: “I visited your website and found that your business complements our services.” Makes you want to drop everything and call them right away, doesn’t it? That’s a line that could have been—and probably was—sent to about a thousand other recipients. We get so many of these that it seems like nothing will get through to someone when you do have something useful for them to hear.
The only way you can make your value proposition sound like you wrote specifically for the person hearing it—is to write it specifically for the person hearing it. Write it in such a way that the person has no doubt at all that you have spent time thinking about them and their needs and have a plausible idea that can improve their lives in some way.
People do care about things that apply directly to them. Think of the cocktail party effect: you’re at a party in a crowded room with many conversations going on at once, but if someone mentions your name across the room, you pick up on it instantly.
To make it apply directly to the recipient, you have to speak to their unique business and to them personally.
Frame it in terms of their unique business
What’s unique about a business? It’s not selling more or spending less—everyone wants to do that, so if that’s all you talk about, how can you be special? What is unique about a business is how they plan to get there—their business strategies and initiatives, the unique challenges they face, are specific to them.
To find something unique, visit their website and find out what they do, and read their annual report if they have one; find out what they care about; glean some of the language they like to use. Even better, if you can find something their CEO or other high-ranking executive said—in a speech or an article—that applies to what you sell—use that. Best of all is to use an analogy that compares what you do for them to what they do for their customers.
If you want to earn the right to a hearing, you have to show knowledge: To put a different twist on an old saying, “They don’t care how much you care until they know how much you know.”
Make it personal
While knowing a lot about their company is a great start, you can get even more specific by relating it to them personally, because even in B2B sales, all decisions are ultimately personal. Most complex sales are going to involve several different people, and each has a different view of the need or the stake in the outcome. So, if you can relate your value proposition to something you can do for them in their specific position, you’re more likely to pique someone’s interest.
Probably the most effective is to show you know something about them personally, and the best way to do this is by using a referral; show you’re part of the club by having a little inside knowledge. Next best is to use something from your research, maybe something that they said or wrote, or the way they describe themselves on their LinkedIn profile.
Is it difficult to make your value proposition sound unique? Not really, but it does take work on your part, and that’s good. Special would not be special if anyone could do it.
I’d like to close with a sales lesson from Leo Tolstoy, who said,
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
To show value, you have to find someone who is unhappy, or who can be made unhappy when they find out what’s possible. That’s why you need to make your value proposition sound different: every customer is unhappy in their own way. If you can show that you understand that, maybe even can name it in your value proposition, you will add unique value.
More importantly, Elmer Snodgrass of 123 Elm Street will hear you loud and clear!
Note: A version of this post ran in Kelly Riggs’ Business LockerRoom blog on March 5.
It’s that time of year again.
For your top three customers, can you answer the following questions:
How did they perform financially last year, compared to their competitors and their own expectations?
What were the major drivers of the results they achieved?
What do they plan to do differently this year?
What is their vision statement?
What are their principal strategies and initiatives?
What challenges and opportunities do they face in the year ahead?
If you had no trouble answering these questions in detail, pat yourself on the back, but don’t get too complacent. These questions—and others—are the bare minimum you should know to qualify as a true consultative salesperson.
If you had trouble, don’t despair, because the answers are readily available to you.
This is my annual lecture to B2B salespeople: by this time of year, every one of your customers has published its annual report, or its fraternal twin, the 10-K form. There is quite simply no excuse for not getting your hands on a copy and reading it.
Actually, let me take back that last statement. There are good reasons not to read your customer’s annual report:
- You’re content selling to lower levels
- You already make enough money
- You’re an order-taker, so it would be a waste of time
If none of these excuses apply to you, immediately leave this page, go to the investor relations section of your customer’s web site, and download their annual report. Then read the damn thing.
And if your top customers are privately-held and don’t publish an annual report, read the one for their top publicly-held competitor.
The decision has already been made
When you shop for a new car, you are probably not an automotive expert who knows all about the fundamentals of a vehicle’s quality: all the hidden things such as the engine, transmission, steering and brakes. How well will the vehicle perform, how reliable will it be, etc. But you can see the car’s finish, and you can slam a door to listen for that satisfying sound that tells you it’s solid and precisely machined. On the other hand, if you notice a blemish in the paint, it’s likely that no number of impeccable reviews would overcome your impression of poor quality. Although you might not admit it, those little quality signals can have a huge influence on your final decision.
Let’s carry over the idea to B2B sales presentations. Suppose you’re a high-level decision maker for a very expensive and technically complex investment facing your company. You have people who have done the detailed work of gathering information and winnowing out potential vendors, but now it’s your responsibility to make the final choice, and you are about to listen to each salesperson or selling team make their pitch. What will you use to decide?
In my book Strategic Sales Presentations, I shared the story of the PR firm that presented to the senior leadership of a large West Coast technology company. The presenting team did such a marvelous job during the presentation that they last person was barely out the door when the CEO turned to my friend and said, “Hire them.”
That CEO had made a decision based on the substitution principle. Daniel Kahneman tells us in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, that our minds like to take shortcuts, so when we are faced with a highly complicated and difficult decision, we often substitute an easier question for the harder one:
“Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.”
Any time you make a buying decision, you are essentially making a probability judgment: that the decision you make has the highest likelihood of making you better off while avoiding additional problems. Probability judgments are always hard, and even more so when they are based on multiple factors that are outside your area of expertise—and the larger and more important the deal, the greater the chance that the key deciders will be generalists. So, it behooves you to get the quality signals just right.
This is in no way a repudiation of my cherished principle that content is king. You absolutely must have a strong and relevant solution to succeed in the long run—a professional and smooth presentation won’t sell a bad solution. But unfortunately good solutions can easily be derailed by bad presentations. Your company may have billions of dollars of assets, thousands of highly competent employees, and state of the art technology, but the decision makers who count can’t see all those things. All they can see is you. You are a signal of quality.
What signals do potential customers look for, albeit unconsciously?
- Do you have my best interests at heart? Do you have a thorough grasp of my business and personal goals; do you understand the problems and opportunities that your offering impacts; what will it be like to work with you; do you sound honest?
- Are you competent? Are you prepared, efficient and organized; if I scratch beneath the surface of your presentation, do you have depth of knowledge; do you sound confident in what you’re talking about?
Seek too hard and you may not find
This morning, Mike Kunkle wrote an excellent article about sales discovery, which is something that sales professionals generally don’t do as well as they should. Mike gives solid actionable advice on how to improve the process, but there is an important distinction I would like to add.
There are two ways to go about the discovery process: you can search or you can explore. Each has its own strengths, but most salespeople do too much searching and not enough exploring.
I would argue that most salespeople go into a conversation with the intent not to explore, but to find. Exploring is truly open-ended: it’s a search for the actual truth, whether or not the truth actually leads to a sale. Finding is getting the answers you are looking for so that it leads to a sale.
Most salespeople don’t do exploring well because they’re not paid to find the truth; they’re paid to find customers.
The difference is that they know what they are looking for, so they craft their questions specifically to lead towards the answers they want. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but unless the truth contains a real need that they may be qualified to address, “searching” questions become patently obvious to the prospect and breed distrust. Even if there is a real need, impatience or lack of skill and subtlety can rush the process and generate resistance.
And if it’s true that your ultimate goal is to jointly create value in which both parties can share, too much of a laser focus can cause you to overlook unexpected opportunities. Indeed, many scientific discoveries came about when a scientist got a fully unexpected result and had the curiosity to pick up the new thread to see where it led. How many of those types of opportunities have you left on the table by ignoring those threads? As Churchill said, “Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.”
The difference between exploring and searching, as I see it, is that exploration requires an open mind and a willingness to face up to unlooked-for and unexpected answers—those that might indicate to you and to the prospect that there is no current need for what you’re selling. Exploration requires a different mind-set than searching; it requires humility to recognize you don’t automatically have all the perfect answers; curiosity to ask the extra why; and courage to confront unwelcome answers.
Exploration is less about SPIN and more about humble inquiry, asking questions when you don’t already know the answer you want.
Exploration may be a less efficient and direct path to the sale you’re after, but when your counterpart senses that you’re honestly seeking understanding and not just another handle to grasp the sale, it fosters the trust, transparency and teamwork that leads to mutually profitable long term relationships. It’s the best way to jointly create and share new value.
The paradox is that the best way to get what you want is to be prepared to hear what you don’t.
