I first bought The Relationship Edge: The Key to Strategic Influence and Selling Success
Intellectually, I guess I’ve wanted it to be true. After all, it seems to me that consultative selling is a meritocracy while relationship selling is a popularity contest. You truly have to know your stuff to make it to the top of CS, but it seems that any natural-born schmoozer and back-slapper can succeed at RS. Those of us on the introverted end of the scale tend to take offense at that.
On the other hand, why not work on being good and popular? When I look objectively at my own sales success, more opportunities have come my way from established relationships and referrals than from cold-calling. It’s much easier to be consultative when people are ready and willing to engage in a conversation, and relationships open the necessary doors.
Acuff’s book actually provides a bridge or middle ground between the two camps. On the one hand, he says that relationships are everything in business. His main premise is that the quality and the richness of our relationships determines in many ways the quality and richness of our lives. But then he spans the divide by adding that creating valuable business relationships is not about making friends, although often lasting friendships will result. It’s not just about making connections either. We all have hundreds of connections that will never turn into valuable business relationships.
What is a valuable business relationship? He begins by describing six levels of relationship, which he calls the Relationship Pyramid. At level 1, they don’t know who you are, and at level 6, you have a valuable business relationship, which he defines as those with AIR: Access, Impact and Results.
Access: will they take your calls and respond promptly to your emails?
Impact: You have an opportunity to influence their actions
Results: They do things proactively to help you succeed.
How do valuable business relationships help you sell? As Acuff says, when trust and rapport are strong, selling pressure will always seem weak; when trust and rapport are weak, any selling pressure will seem too strong.
All of us have a number of Level 6 relationships which have developed naturally in our work and personal lives. Acuff shows us how to implement a mindset and process to substantially increase our natural “hit rate” and grow the number of Level 6 relationships.
Mindset: You have to think that relationships are important, and that you have something of value to add to others. The paradox of building relationships is that you have to be genuinely interested in others as people—not as contacts or connections—and later the benefits will come. The best advice in the book is to envision that everyone you talk to has the following words tattooed on their forehead: “Make me feel important.”
Process: Mindset is useless without a process to develop relationships and to turn those relationships into measurable results. The process is pretty simple. First you list your most important relationships, assess where each one is on the pyramid, and then create a plan to move each relationship to higher levels. You do this by increasing your touches, learning more about them as people, taking actions that will make their lives better in some ways, etc.
To learn more about people, the book suggests a list of 20 questions. I don’t agree with all of them, and I won’t remember them all anyway, so the best thing to remember is FORM: Family, Occupation, Recreation, and Motivation. Of course, the danger with lists like this is that some people will become determined to get the answers from all their contacts and will go about it in a formulaic and self-defeating way. Acuff shares ways to ask the questions properly and weave them naturally into the conversation.
My own take after reading Acuff’s process is a bit different. The first thing I’ve done is turn the pyramid upside down, because it’s really a funnel. Just like a sales funnel, suspects enter at the top and closed deals emerge from the bottom, once they have gone through a codified and systematic selling/buying process. This way, you can set goals for new contacts to put in the funnel, have measurable events that will indicate objectively what the quality of a relationship is, and have goals for numbers of level 6 relationships created. At the moment, I am working through what the gates or milestones are at each level, and what are the best tactics for moving a relationship through the funnel.
The one weakness in the book is that it is a bit thin on some of this practical advice. For example, Acuff says you need goals, but his chapter on goal setting is basically the ABCs of SMART goals, with very little practical advice on what some specific goals should be, and what tactics are best at each stage. I would have loved to see a chapter entitled: “50 ways to move people up the pyramid.”
That said, everyone is different, and maybe it’s best that the reader is left to figure out specifics on his own. The important thing is to have the right mindset, make a plan to work through the process, and stick to it. The Relationship Edge can help you with the big picture, and you can fill in the colors that work best for you.
Calculating the profit contribution of the next deal?
Key point: Turn your engineering and technical staff into a hugely valuable selling asset by making selling acceptable, accessible, and appealing.
Companies that sell high-tech systems, or professional services such as engineering and consulting services, will often have more non-sales people interacting on a daily basis with their customers than their own formal sales force. These non-sales staff are often physically located in the client’s location and work closely with users and influencers every single day; when they do their jobs right, they develop strong relationships, deep credibility, and intimate knowledge of their clients’ operations, viagra culture, problems and opportunities, often in advance of anyone else knowing these things. In fact, some companies even dispense with salespeople and rely entirely on their engineers to serve clients and generate additional revenue.
Relationships, credibility and knowledge are priceless assets that any salesperson would kill to have, because they are the foundation of stellar sales success. Time after time in training sessions where the client includes technical staff as part of the sales team for the class, I’ve seen non-sales staff come up with some of the best insights and suggestions to advance the sales strategy or opportunity.
In addition, engineers and other technical staff can be your advance scouts into potential opportunities. The Corporate Executive Board tells us that buyers are about 60% of the way through their buying process before they contact potential suppliers.[1] In other words, most sales opportunities form long before they are visible to the outside world. They form within daily processes and operations, when things don’t work as well as they should, when things change and companies need to adapt and respond.
Yet these assets often go untapped and quite frankly, wasted, because the people who have them don’t use them to advance the revenue goals of their employers.
Why aren’t they doing it now? Engineers either:
- Don’t want to do it because they see it as distasteful. Make selling acceptable.
- Don’t want to do it because they see it as difficult or specialized. Make selling accessible.
- Don’t see the need to do it. Make selling appealing.
I will address each of these issues in a separate article. Here, we will discuss how to reframe selling so that it is acceptable to engineers.
Make it acceptable
The first hurdle to get over is the negative perception of selling that the typical engineer has. If you asked them the following question directly, which do you think they might check?
What is selling?
- A sleazy activity that tricks people to buy things they don’t want or need, or:
- Two parties agreeing to exchange resources in order to leave each party better off.
Nothing you do will have much effect until you can reframe their view of selling to something approaching the second option. [2]You have to show them that selling is a perfectly acceptable and even admirable activity. Very few people will wholeheartedly pursue an activity that contradicts the way they see themselves, regardless of how many carrots or sticks you use.
Here’s how engineers see themselves:
- Engineers solve problems.
- Engineers make the world a better place.
- Engineers are objective, honest and direct.
- Engineers are smart.
How does the ideal view of selling jibe with this self-image?
Engineers solve problems. Solution and consultative selling are both about solving problems for customers. Solution selling solves known problems, and consultative uncovers and addresses hidden problems. Learn how customers do things, find ways to improve them, and make the suggestion—that’s real selling!
Engineers make the world a better place. Selling is about making the world a better place. When two parties agree to exchange resources, it is because each intends to benefit from the transaction. While this is no guarantee that things will work, it’s an honest effort to make things better. As long as the discussion and the transaction are conducted honestly and with good intentions, both sides win, the relationship is strengthened, and the world is a better place. Plus, for those who would rather work on important problems and not trivial ones, trying to sell the solution is the most brutally clear way of finding out its true value.
Engineers are objective, honest, and direct. So are the salespeople who are most successful in the long run. They know that the only way to develop long-term, trust-based relationships is to deliver on their promises, and they can only do this when their promises are based in reality. When they can’t do something, they will tell the client. They may lose business by telling the client that there is a better alternative for them, but then this is business that they probably should not pursue anyway, and they will get other chances. Salespeople who are not afraid to (tactfully) challenge their customers’ view of the world will earn their respect and their attention.
Engineers are smart. This is definitely true for most of the ones I’ve met, but technical brilliance alone won’t make the world beat a path to your door. To paraphrase what Plato said about politics: “Those who refuse to engage in sales are destined to be ruled by those who are dumber.” Besides, the ability to deal with the complexities of personal perception and decision-making, at the pace of human conversation, is not trivial.
In part 2 of this series, we’ll see how to explain the sales process so that it is accessible. Part 3 is about how to make it appealing.
As should be obvious to my readers by now, I’ve recently been on a kick to apply lean principles to sales and personal productivity. The core of lean is to reduce muda, or waste, and waste is defined as any activity that does not add value to the customer.
If you work in sales for a company, you probably have to enter an account plan into a CRM system, and you are very likely less than enthusiastic about it. Companies love CRM systems because it helps them capture information about their customers, but one of the major challenges is to get salespeople to consistently supply accurate information.
Why is that? There are actually three customers for the activities that salespeople perform: their customers, their employers, and themselves. In many cases, the only one of those three who receives value from many CRM systems is the employer.
Salespeople naturally would rather spend their time in front of customers than in front of computer screens filling out forms, so they’re naturally reluctant to take the time. In addition, they often see the systems as a surveillance tool that their management uses to keep tabs on their activities.
Customers don’t care if the account plan gets into the seller’s CRM, because to them that is not an activity that adds value. In fact, if they can’t reach the account manager because he or she is busy filling out their forms, they see it as worse than waste.
Fortunately there is a way out of this. The trick is to design the plan so that it adds value to all three stakeholders. A properly designed account plan does more than capture static information about a customer. It allows for the salesperson to think critically and plan for ways to deliver insights, consulting, or solutions[1] to help their customers improve their business.
Salespeople will get value from the plan if it helps them focus their thinking on what they know and don’t know about their customers’ needs and decision process. Probably the major benefit that participants in my account planning workshops get is uncovering the “unknown unknowns”, those hidden land mines that often turn out to be the difference-makers in winning or losing business. Most salespeople are way overconfident about how much information they carry in their heads. They think that they know everything they need to know about the customer’s situation, and the only way to expose the fallacy is to force them to write down the answers to hard questions. When they uncover what they know and don’t know about the customer’s needs, the solution fit and the decision process, their action steps become much clearer to them, which leads to less wasted activity and shorter selling cycles. Well-designed account plans also share information within the various members of the sales team and help spark additional ideas.
How does the customer benefit from well-designed account plans? When salespeople are sincerely using plans to figure out better ways to provide value, solve problems, or help the customer achieve their business and personal goals, they will bring better solutions. They will also waste less of the customers’ time.
In fact, if the employer designs the account plans from the point of view of helping salespeople better add value to the end customer, their own value will take care of itself, because salespeople will embrace the process and consistently provide accurate and valuable information.
Actually, you could apply this approach to any sales activity. Simply ask yourself how much value each customer of the activity is getting from it. Those that help the end customer and the salesperson, usually end up benefiting the employer as well.
[1] I’m covering my bases with the Challenger Selling and Solution Selling camps here. Just call me Switzerland.
