So, you think your company is customer-focused? If you’re not involving the top executives of your top accounts in your planning, you’re not as customer-focused as you could be. While every B2B company pays lip service to customer focus, few go as far as the prescriptions in The B2B Executive Playbook: The Ultimate Weapon for Achieving Sustainable, Predictable and Profitable Growth
In B2B sales, there is a surprisingly small group of individuals who hold the most control over your fate—your revenue, profitability and market share. They are the executive decision makers of your best customers.
- How often do you talk to them?
- How well do you really know what they think about your company and your offerings?
- Do you know exactly why they buy from you?
- Does your perception of your strengths and weaknesses jibe with theirs?
- If you picked up the phone to call each one, what would happen?
This last question is taken from page 95, which in itself is worth the price of the book. Geehan provides a simple assessment you can use to figure out where you stand on the B2B relationship continuum, which has five descriptions ranging from Commodity Supplier to Business Partner. The phone call test for each one is simple and powerful—and if you answer it honestly, you probably will be disturbed by the result.
The theme of the book is about how to achieve sustainable, predictable and profitable growth (SPPG) through close and active engagement with your top executive customers. While this may not seem like a huge revelation, very few companies do it well, and the value in this book consists of its specific four-step plan for how to accomplish this.
Engage: “Engagement means executive customers are talking to your leadership team directly and without filters.” In this section, Geehan explains how to establish and use an Executive Customer Advisory Council (ECAC) to get your top customers engaged in the process, and whom to include. Because they are the ones who write the really big checks, you can’t leave it entirely in the hands of your account managers; your own executive leadership must be continuously and deeply engaged with them.
Plan: Every company has a strategic planning process, in which they make decisions about strategy, products, markets, resource allocation, etc., but very few involve the stakeholders who vote with their dollars to approve or disapprove of their plans. Geehan advocates Market-Aligned Planning, which uses customer input to help identify which strategies to eliminate, evolve, or acquire.
Collaborate: Most companies equate relationship-building with entertainment. Geehan recommends a much deeper process called Account-Based Innovation, which uses customer inputs to inform choices about R&D and make innovation relevant (and worthwhile). Companies have long learned to minimize internal silos that slow down innovation—this process eliminates the last remaining silo, that between companies and their customers. 60-70% of new products in the B2B space fail; why not give the customer a voice before the cost, trouble and time go into the launch?
Grow: When customers have an early and active role in your planning processes, they often become your best salespeople within their industries. The book cites the example of Henny Penny Corporation, which used the process to design a low oil volume fryer for McDonald’s. That breakthrough led to their being named Worldwide Equipment Partner[1] of the Year in 2010, and that kind of publicity was priceless for other customers.
This book is not for everyone: it’s clearly aimed at those within the company who have primary responsibility for revenue growth. It offers offers clear, direct prescriptions, backed by numerous examples that provide credibility and illumination to the author’s thesis. If you want to listen to the Voice of the Customers that really matter, this book will show you how.
Tens of thousands of sales presentations are delivered to potential customers every day, but very few of them are strategic sales presentations.
A sales presentation is strategic when it delivers the right content to the right people at the right time to advance or close your sale.
Right content: The majority of sales presentations are really talking brochures, in which the salesperson verbally delivers content that is easily available to audience members on web pages or in promotional material. It usually talks about the features of the product or touts the virtues of the company selling it. Right content is about the customer: how their business outcomes can be improved through their decision to buy your offering. How will their current processes be improved, what problems will be solved, and what will be the financial impact of these changes? One simple test is to look at your content and calculate the percentage that talks about your customer versus about yourself and your solution. In addition, calculate how much of the content is specific to that one customer at that particular time. You can take this even further by ensuring that content is targeted to the needs and concerns of specific individuals.
Right people: Very early in the sales cycle, you may need an executive to be present to ensure the project receives the priority it deserves, and of course you want them there for the closing presentation. But be careful of imposing on their time when you’re not directly adding value to them. In the evaluation stage of the customer’s buying process, their presence may be unnecessary and even counterproductive.
It’s also a natural tendency to want to pack the audience with your supporters and avoid detractors or opponents. If you have identified opponents in the decision process, it is crucial to have them there when you present, even if it adds another level of stress. This will at least give you a chance to answer their objections. If you exclude them, they will just voice their objections when you’re not there. Or, if they feel the decision was forced on them, you’re going to have a tough time during implementation even if you do make the sale.
Right time: You have to understand where your customer is in their buying cycle and tailor your content accordingly. If they haven’t fully recognized their need, for example, it would be premature to focus on the superiority of your solution.
There’s a saying that nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come, which implies that the idea will fall flat if the time is not right. If what you are selling is a radical departure from status quo or challenges long-held beliefs and attitudes, it’s unlikely that you will succeed in one shot. In such cases, the quiet behind-the-scenes selling and lobbying you do will shape the conditions for success.
Advance the sale: A sales presentation is still a sales call, and one of the most fundamental—and ignored—steps in sales calls is to specify up front your purpose for the call. The call purpose must be viewed within the context of the sales opportunity plan, and thus must include a measurable advance in the sales cycle. It does not have to be a close; in long complex sales cycles closing calls are in the minority. But it should add value to the seller and the buyer. (In fact, you could profit from changing the wording to “advance the buying decision in your favor”.)
For example, a purpose could be to “gain agreement on the cost of the problem”. This purpose adds value to the seller by increasing the buyer’s urgency to make a decision and potentially shortening the sales cycle. The buyer benefits by recognizing the scope of the problem and possibly by gaining insights that will help them improve the potential solution.
To ensure that your sales presentation is strategic, then, use this short checklist:
Do I have the right content that targets your listeners’ unique needs and concerns?
Are the right people in the room?
Is this the right time for this presentation?
Am I crystal clear on what I want to achieve and why?
This week’s book recommendation is Sales Growth: Five Proven Strategies from the World’s Sales Leaders
With a few exceptions, you may not find a lot of jaw-dropping revelations in the book, but it’s well worth reading for the three important services it provides for sales leaders and for the profession of sales:
First, it provides a template of best practices being used by some top sales organizations. They interviewed 120 sales executives from 100 large companies in 10 industry sectors that have “significantly outperformed their peers”. Although this is far short of gold standard for research methods, it’s far better than many similar sales books (and business books in general) that claim to have found the secrets to success, so their prescriptions are worth reading. The five strategies are:
- Find growth before your competitors do
- Sell the way your customers want
- Soup up your sales engine
- Focus on your people
- Lead sales growth
Each strategy is further broken down into specific practices, and support for their success is provided statistically and anecdotally. They are summarized in a table at the end of the book which compares “good” to “great” practices; in my opinion, the eight pages from 207-214 are more than worth the price of the book and should be taped up in the offices of every sales executive. While few of the strategies will be a revelation to any sales professional, I’d venture to guess that no one is firing on all cylinders on more than one or two.
Second, the book reinforces a growing and welcome trend toward moving sales from an art to a science, by putting data at the heart of it. If we want sales to be more professional and a more respected aspect of business, we’ve got to become more data-driven. In fact, one of the relatively new topics covered in the book is the use of Big Data to support several of the five strategies, and we’re going to see much more about this in the near future. There are several good examples of companies using it to look beyond averages to identify opportunities at a much more granular level, to gain insights from social media, an—most importantly—to provide actionable insights to individual salespeople. As the data crunchers get better at doing the latter, you’re going to see much more demand for it from the field.
Finally, if you’ve ever had the frustrating experience of vainly trying to get your message across to top management, only to have them jump on it when a prestigious consultant says it, you will appreciate the third service provided by Sales Growth. It’s hard to have a more prestigious mouthpiece than McKinsey in your corner. So, if you’re a sales leader and have been trying to get more resources or attention for some of your sales initiatives, make sure a copy of this book finds its way to your executive suite.
