Your sales reps need to know how your customers think about their customers. How educated are they about this? Everyone gets product training, but other desperately needed enterprise sales education topics are neglected. Here are a few:
- Listening skills
- Customers’ industries, business processes, and critical business metrics
- Usage situations (“use-cases”) of your products / services
- Negotiation in a style that fits your brand and company character
- Long-term account planning (Not the sales process. The relationship process.)
- Research, information gathering, and asking questions to discover pains and opportunities
- Presentation skills sans Power Point
Idea Design’s blog about asking is right on – and applies to businesses as much as to charities. At the end are three points that may as well have been written for businesses – here they are, with business terms inserted:
“1. Be where your [customers and prospects] are. Hang out with them. Learn their language and be relevant to them.
2. If you want to [close deals] sooner or later you are going to have to ask for [the sale].
3. And when you do ask, ask in a way that is appropriate to your [customer]. ”
In a business, these apply to the sales reps, and to the rest of your organization. Get your messages into the places customers look to for information (note – first place they look is not your website). Your marketing, services, and product development / design staff should be attending the same events, reading the same publications, and participating in the same discussions on and off-line that your target audiences do.
Most sales people don’t have much trouble asking for a sale – but they often fail to do their homework and communicate why their offer should matter to the customer in the customer’s terms. That makes the ask inappropriate. To increase the frequency of yeses, increase the relevance of your offers. To make that relevance natural, as Idea Design suggests, hang out with the customers.
I hate hate hate pricing my consulting work. There is always a tension between the value it brings to the client (which gurus like Alan Weiss will tell you is the only thing that matters), the reality of the client’s budget, the amount of effort and expertise required, internal company politics, etc.
So even before reading the article about a coffee shop that does not post prices, I had tried handing the pricing reigns to clients by asking some version of, “What do you think this work should cost, given the value you expect it will bring?”
Results? Some clients did not want to name a number, and I ended up pricing the project as usual. Some DID name a price: always higher than I would have quoted. The difference: Clients who were comfortable naming a price already knew me and had worked with my firm before. It seems letting your customer set the price may be a great model when:
1. The customer is well-informed about the product and its value, or can become informed easily and quickly as in the case of the coffee shop. (This is the basis for free trials: Assume the customer will assign little or no value when first encountering a product. Depend on familiarity leading customers to agree with you on price.)
2. The customer has had some exposure to competing products and prices, and has a basis for comparing the relative worth of your product vs. the others.
3. The customer has a relationship with you, even if only a momentary one (note in the video that the cafe owner describes people “looking him in the eye and stating what they think is fair”)
Share your thoughts on if and when letting customers set the price is the right thing to do.
More than once over the last few months, I’ve had the unsettling experience of meeting with a potential client, planning to discuss how I can help their company, only to to discover they are no longer with their company. As sign of the times, to be sure. Moving contacts create challenges at existing accounts, but opportunities elsewhere. So what does one do when your key contact at an account suddenly isn’t at the account?
A few thoughts:
Be proactive – diversify: Cultivate multiple relationships within each account. Follow up with people you meet in meetings or who collaborate with you during and after the sale. Ask your sponsor or champion to make a few introductions, particularly in different departments or organizations than their own.
Follow: Social networking tools make it easy to keep in touch as people move about. Take note of status changes that may indicate a new position, employment status, or company.
Help: This is a time when active networking and introductions are more valuable than ever – offer them. Whether its a potential employer, employee, or partner, introductions are a great way to create value and build relationships.
Follow Up: Make sure customers who have bought from you before know how you can help them deliver results as they take on new roles in new organizations.
Systematize: Your top reps already do all of the above. Consider spiffs or other programs to make sure the new contacts make it from personal spreadsheets into your CRM systems. Help all reps get proactive by measuring the breadth of contacts at accounts on an on-going basis. Provide simple tools like email templates to make re-connecting easier.
Comment and share your own ideas on maintaining sales contacts in these tumultuous times.
