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.
Sometimes we focus too much on the wrong thing.
It seems like everyone has been beating up on solution selling recently, so I’d like to join the fun and kick it while it’s down.
That may not sound fair, but I have good reason to dislike the phrase. The idea is a good one—but most salespeople hear the cliché and forget the true meaning behind it.
Those who view it most superficially fall into the trap of thinking don’t realize that calling your product a “solution” does not automatically make you a solution provider. I once saw a sign above the door of a deli in New York which touted its “lunch solutions.” Believe me, it did not make the lunch taste any better. Salespeople aren’t the only ones guilty of this; it also seems to have infected everyone who writes marketing collateral.
Those who sort of get it are a little better. They know they have to ask questions to understand the customer’s problems, probe further to get the customer to understand the implications, and then help the customer arrive at their true needs. The only problem is, they tend to view questions as a means to make a hole to shove their solution in. Once they have reached a sufficient size hole that is close to the right shape, here it comes, ready or not.
Those who truly get the idea of solution selling also probe to understand needs, but they don’t stop at the surface. When the customer describes a problem that appears to be a fit for their solution, they make the effort to go deeper, because they know that in the long run, a band-aid solution that merely covers up symptoms is going to lead to problems down the road, for both the seller and the buyer. Rather than focusing immediately on implications, they drill down into diagnostic questions, to make sure they understand the root causes of the problem.
Sometimes they don’t get the answer they want, and lose the immediate sale by telling the customer that their own solution is not the right one for them. Sometimes, their diligence is rewarded by uncovering a larger and more significant opportunity.
Either way, they gain respect and trust that pays off in the long run. More importantly they maintain their own self-respect as professionals who have the customer’s best interests in mind.
Sales professionals know that the true spirit of solution selling requires them to slow down, worry much less about getting to the solution, and focus more on the problem. They know that if the diagnosis is correct, the prescription follows naturally.
Ironically, slowing down often results in faster sales, because when the buyer sees that they are sincerely focused on understanding the right problem to be solved, their trust and comfort level go way up.
