Sales Laundry

Archive for May, 2009

Have you identified all the areas where you create value for your customer?  Do you communicate all of the value you create? 

 Over the last few weeks I have been working with a sales professional struggling to figure out where he could create value for his customers.  His focus on creating value began and ended with his products and the problems his products solved for his customers. 

 I asked him to broaden his definition of “creating value” and with that we began to uncover some new exciting ways he could create some value for his customers.  As a bonus I got a few new ideas of my own.  Here is an absolutely incomplete list of ideas that might help you find some new ways to create some value during your own sales process. 

 NOTE: as a newly minted sales professional many years ago, I thought I determined where and when value was created for a customer and it took more than a few sales calls to slap that silly idea out of my head.  The customer is the ultimate judge on whether or not value has been created. 

Needs Identification Stage

 Help the customer identify what the problems are.  Some customers will have a clear understanding of the problems at hand, others may see a symptom or two, a few will have no idea there is a problem, let alone what to do about it.  In many instances you can create value by just knowing where to look. 

 Automaker Henry Ford asked electrical genius Charlie Steinmetz to build generators for his factory.  One day the generators ground to a halt, and the repairmen could not find the problem.  In desperation, Ford called Steinmetz, who tinkered with the machines for a few hours and then threw the switch.  Sure enough, the generators whirred to life and Steinmetz forwarded a bill to Ford a bill for $10,000.  Flabbergasted, the tightfisted carmaker inquired why the bill was so high. 

 Steinmetz sent Ford a new invoice. $10 – for tinkering with the generators.  $9,990 for knowing where to tinker.  Ford paid the bill.¹

Help establish a virtual meeting of influencers and decision makers to see a problem in 360 degrees and discover latent issues.  Very few organizations have a mechanism to allow multiple people across diverse but related parts of the company to take the time to sit around one table, identify and solve problems.  You can provide that mechanism by visiting with each member separately and sharing the results. 

Evaluation Stage

 Filtering information to find the right solution.  There are more products and more ways to go about solving a problem today than ever before.  Value can be created for a customer looking for an expert to help them map their needs to the right solution for them.  The less a customer knows the higher that value creation can become.

 Help fill gaps in your customer’s knowledge about the latest technology or solutions available.  For customers that make purchasing decisions every few years, expert knowledge amassed in 2005 may not serve them well when making a decision today.  Helping a customer catch up on current technology and/or helping them maintain their role of internal “expert” can create value.

 Build a solution based on the years of experience.  An honest expert opinion from someone specializing in solving just the sort of challenges a business is facing creates value.  

Purchase Stage  

 Make the process easy, convenient and as painless as possible.  For reoccurring transactional purchases driven by price in particular, a simplified purchasing process vs. your competitor can make a significant difference in which company gets the business.

 Helping customers get solutions they need but do not have the desire to fight for.  One of my customers needed to rebuild his company’s technology infrastructure, but he could not bring himself to wage the internal political battle necessary to accomplish this task.  I tried to create value by teaming up with him to help him achieve his objective.  He steered us through the necessary internal meetings I shot down the obstacles that got in our way.  I created value in this instance just by being willing to help and provide support where needed along the way.

 Establishing relationships in purchasing can help you help your client get projects pushed through or speed the approval process.  Having a good relationship with a customers purchasing department can be very beneficial.  In one odd circumstance I found myself creating value just by being the liaison between my customer and their internal purchasing department because there was such animosity between the two groups.

 Creative term structuring.  Having a customer that is ready to buy but short on the necessary budget can be an opportunity to create some significant value.  Creative terms worked out between vendors, distributors, manufacturers, and leasing companies have won some massive projects for me that otherwise would have been lost. 

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“Creating Value” for a customer or prospect does not have to come from your product or service alone.  Value can come from anywhere and it is up to you to find it.  Anything from a strong familiar company name to the way a delivery person acts when facing end clients can create value for the customer.    

 This has by no means been an exhaustive list and I would like to get your input so we can add more ideas to make this a stronger tool.  Where do you “create value” for your customers?  Send me your ideas and I will add them to the list. 

Q&A’s are excerpts of questions I have answered as part of Sales Laundry or other forums that I am apart of.  If there is a relevant sales message for the masses I post it here to share, gather feedback and discuss.

Q:  Does sales training really work?  Why don’t more companies engage in training programs?

 A:  Does sales training work? Yes.

 In fact there is not a more cost effective way to convey massive amounts of information to a sales team over a short period of time.

 So, why all of the problems getting companies to sign up?

 Sales training works, but…

 If the person trained does not use the knowledge, the knowledge will simply leak out of their head.

 Which requires Sales Managers be trained and to reinforce the new behaviors with field sales coaching.

 Sales Managers do not typically do field coaching because it is almost never something they are held accountable for, so sales coaching gets bumped to next week  as call reports, expense reports, forecasts, etc. that they are held accountable for each week, get done.

 Changing the Sales Manager role requires Executive management to make reinforcing their sales training a priority and making sure Sales Managers have the time they need to work one on one out in the field, even if that means cutting some reporting requirements.   

 Frankly, most companies do not realize the extent of the changes that need to be made to their organizations to properly support their sales training efforts.  Many are not willing to put forth the effort in the long term to make lasting changes in their sales organizations and sometimes the required changes in their sales/management infrastructure are more painful than just absorbing the cost of the training and writing it off as a failed experiment and promising never to make the “mistake” of signing up for training again.

The companies that do build sales training into their culture do find measurable long term improvements in their sales organizations.

Tonight I was at an elementary school talent show watching children do their absolute best to entertain us with singing, gymnastics, karate, piano, jump rope and much much more.

Six singers performed, one with a truly beautiful voice, but she is not the one anyone is going to remember.

Everyone will remember contestant number 7.

Contestant number 7 was a six year old little girl in the first grade with black bouncy pigtails.

She walked out from behind the curtain to center stage standing close to the front edge under a single spotlight in an otherwise dark auditorium.

It took a while for her music to start so she just stood very still, holding her microphone against her chest, waiting and staring out into the black.  In the silence you could hear her nervous shaky breathing until finally her music began.

Within five notes it was obvious this six year old did not have a singer’s voice.

Within fifteen notes no one in the room cared.

What she might of lacked in natural ability she more than made up for in her self-confidence and heart, putting everything she had into her performance.  She belted out her song like it was the final encore of a two hour sold out stadium concert.  It was a huge, powerful sound coming out of such a small person.

When she finished, the audience roared with emotion punctuated by whistles and shouts that did not end until the emcee called for calm.

In a room of a few hundred people, this very nervous little girl, lacking both natural talent and professional training sang on pure heart and confidence, doing her absolute best with the talent she had been given.  She gave us every ounce of energy and emotion her little body could muster and everyone forgot about that whole not singing so good part, and she was rewarded like she was a star.

There will be times when you have to take the stage against people that have more talent, training and skill than you possess.  There will be times when you are at a competitive disadvantage for one reason or another.  There will be times when your friends or co-workers will tell you that you have no chance and that you should not even bother showing up.

Sometimes they will be right, but almost always, finding the courage to do your absolute best regardless of the odds will be a more rewarding experience than not having taken the journey at all.

When you reach one of those circumstances that you think you cannot win, summon the confidence to at least be the one who will be remembered.

“Eighty percent of success is just showing up.”

Woody Allen

Image courtesy of Corbis