Marketing
Repeatable Sales Motions vs. Individual Selling Success
A sales organization that consistently exceeds aggressive goals is the holy grail for growth-focused companies. A repeatable sales motion is often seen as the vehicle to make that happen. Unfortunately, few companies have translated salesmanship and the art of selling into the science of repeatable sales.
Often, one or two successful deals become the foundation for what is believed to be the repeatable sales motion. Two common scenarios are:
- You may have lookalike prospects to target based on a limited sample of sales. That doesn’t mean there is real scale potential, but it is a start.
- This approach fails to address other independent variables, and often results in an approach that is neither repeatable nor scalable.
- You have one salesperson who is very successful, but their success has not been repeatable.
- The nice thing about this scenario is that a repeatable sales motion is more likely, but understanding the subtleties of their approach can be difficult to quantify, document, and turn into something repeatable.
Let’s take a more analytical look at what works and why, which leads to a better understanding of how to develop repeatability.
As the Roman philosopher Seneca is quoted as saying, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
Preparation is more than understanding the prospect company, their competition and differences, the market they operate in, and what changes may be coming (technological, legislative, economic, etc.)—although that is often far more preparation than many Account Execs bring to a meeting. I’m always amazed at how unprepared many sellers are, and that is the quickest way to lose your prospect’s respect.
I’ve learned over the years that planning for the unexpected is planning for sustainable success. That can be as tough and nebulous as it sounds. You need to stay calm, unemotional, and in control while assessing the situation and adapting on the fly. Confidence definitely helps, as does logic. Composure is key to presenting a professional presence.
I like the Five Whys method of drilling into those statements or concerns to understand them. Sometimes it’s fluff, but often it helps you close the deal faster because you uncovered a pain that others missed. This can also help qualify a prospect out quickly and move on to a better fit that develops into a closed-won deal.
Salesmanship includes:
- Being prepared.
- Being friendly, approachable, and likable.
- Relationship building. It starts with finding connections and common interests, then demonstrating your ability to help the prospect solve their problem (and at this stage they may be more focused on symptoms than root causes).
- Understanding the need. Why is this important to them? Document this, including their phrases and terminology, as that can have a huge impact on their acceptance of your proposed solution.
- Having value to add. This includes product knowledge, company knowledge (website, 10-K/10-Q, articles, etc.), competitive knowledge, industry knowledge, and more.
- This gives you a perspective on their business that may not be 100% accurate, but it lets you make assertions the prospect will likely validate or correct. Your knowledge will also impress them and likely lead to deeper discussions about their needs and goals.
- AI can significantly reduce your preparation time for this.
- This gives you a perspective on their business that may not be 100% accurate, but it lets you make assertions the prospect will likely validate or correct. Your knowledge will also impress them and likely lead to deeper discussions about their needs and goals.
- Being respectful. This starts with respecting their time.
- Don’t be late to calls. Don’t spend time on things that are not relevant. Don’t ignore the people that you are speaking with by focusing on higher-level decision makers. And don’t badmouth other products they may be using or competitive solutions.
- Being focused on solving their problems. Without this, you won’t build a loyal, lasting customer base.
- To me, this is as much about reputation as it is about salesmanship.
- Learning from failures (yours and others) as much as success. Evolution matters: improve and become your best.
These are all teachable/learnable skills. They also address the intangibles that fuel selling success.
So, which came first – the selling successes or the repeatable sales motions?
To me, they go hand-in-hand. By building a high-performance sales team, pooling information from sales discovery calls and other meetings, and focusing on patterns of unmet needs and the associated messaging, you can create and refine something repeatable. It takes more than one or two wins to prove a pattern exists, so create a hypothesis early and work to refine or refute it with every prospect interaction.
Selling may not come naturally to a lot of people (it wasn’t for me), but it is a muscle you can develop with hard work, practice, and a goal of improving every day. Your success may look like luck to others, but you will know better.
The Power of Storytelling
Discussions of data and goals in business are common, but not always engaging. Worse, they become routine and are ignored. Without a vision, heart, and excitement, motivation wanes, and the likelihood of success diminishes.
Stories evoke emotions, and emotions often trump logic when it comes to getting buy-in and creating excitement. Stories help with visualization, and visualizing success has been shown to enhance goal achievement. Think about the power of good TED Talks to help you understand and retain ideas.
Steve Jobs realized that people are drawn to engaging stories that evoke emotion. He created relatable scenarios that helped people understand the benefits of a technologically advanced solution without having to dive deep into the technology. He spoke about things that were fun, exciting, and useful. He was visionary, but just as important, he could share that vision and create demand. Relatability and engagement, when done right, create an emotional attachment that drives action.
When my team and I were selling a leading-edge vector analytics database years ago, our Marketing team and other experts wanted us to focus on what later became known as “speeds and feeds.” Our product was faster and more advanced than our competitors’, but our message was undifferentiated from theirs. That is not a good place to start when your competitors are larger and better known.
I created a weekly webinar that we called “Why Fast Matters.” We started by discussing common issues around the complexity and inflexibility of Star Schemas, Fact Tables, pre-aggregation, specialized hardware, and more. The focus was on agility that created a tangible business advantage while saving money. One of the stories I would tell was around a beautiful, multi-layered cake. It is a thing of beauty, taking a lot of time and skill to create. It was also fragile and expensive.
The story concluded like this:
“Now, picture yourself taking a bite of that amazing cake with your eyes closed. Think about how rich, flavorful, and amazing it is. Then someone hands you a fork, and you take another bite. It is just as amazing. You open your eyes and see a plated piece of the amazing layer cake alongside a cupcake. They were both delicious, and with your eyes closed, the results were the same. But one was complex and fragile, and the other was simple, quick, and inexpensive. There is a time and place for each, but when you are betting your success on an outcome, do you really care how you get there?”
We closed with a brief explanation of the technology, real-life proof points, and a call to action to prove its effectiveness in their environment using their data. The close helped demonstrate that this was not just a made-up story, but rather, something that could become their own success story. This was a straightforward approach to getting people to try something they might never have considered otherwise.
Essentially, you are shifting the audience’s mindset from how something gets done (means objective) to what matters and why it needs to be done (fundamental objective).
People tend to have preconceived ideas about how the solution should work, often based on what they are familiar with. Once the audience visualizes their desired outcome, they become more open to different approaches.
I have successfully used these approaches with more complex products, such as an advanced Kubernetes platform, object databases, a multi-platform data integration product, and the world’s first commercial JDBC driver. It is also an effective way to motivate teams. Create a vision of successfully executing a plan, how good it feels to achieve your goals, and what it could mean for each person—an area they develop as their minds elaborate and personalize the story.
Some of the most effective and engaging people that I have known are skillful storytellers. Not everything has to be a story, but when you use it at the right time, it can mean the difference between moving closer to your goal and being just one of many ideas or solutions.
You may not be the next Steve Jobs (I’m certainly not), but you could easily stand out from your peers and competition. Share your story in the comments below!
Sales Discussions that Work
Selling is challenging work, and often, “we” (sales and marketing teams) make it even harder than it needs to be. How many times have you seen a selling script, elevator pitch, or initial presentation that is long, boring, and undifferentiated? People have short attention spans, and nobody wants to interact with someone who doesn’t listen or is pushy.
Your initial discussion is crucial to your success. Instead of going over a list of features, reading a slide deck, and telling why you and your product are so great, let’s try something different.
1. Understand why people buy. Any change can be difficult, risky, and painful. So, the pain they are facing has to be even greater than the potential pain of change, or they won’t bother changing.
Your main job early on is to listen and work to understand their concerns. You may have a perfect solution, but if it doesn’t solve their pain, it holds little value to your prospect. This initial meeting is all about them.
2. At the start of the meeting, ask, “What would make this time well spent for you? What would you like to walk away from this meeting with?” Get them thinking about their problems and the value you may be able to provide, even if they don’t fully articulate them to you.
3. Ask questions and follow-up questions. People don’t lead with their significant issues, and someone unwilling to divulge anything likely isn’t a buyer. The more the prospect talks, the more you learn. So many sellers do not understand this simple concept. They want to dazzle you with features and demos – even if those things are not what the prospect needs.
4. Once you think that you have identified a pain, restate it, qualify and quantify it. For example, “You mentioned that your product release cycles are too long and complex. What is the business impact of that, and what would the impact be if you could reduce that time and effort by 50%?” Write their response down, in their own words, because it could be vital later.
If you identify several pain points, review them and ask the prospect to identify the top three issues from the list, and then ask why those three. Once you have their answer, ask if other stakeholders in their organization would agree with that list, and why or why not. Again, get them to expand their thinking and work through this, as it will help you identify other stakeholders who may have other priorities.
5. If you are giving a presentation, pull up the most relevant slide (customer problem/benefit slides work well here) and ask if this sounds similar to the problem they are facing. It can be a good starting point for getting the discussion moving in the right direction. By providing relevant information, especially about how you solved a similar problem for another customer, they will see the value of providing you with more data and information.
6. Don’t worry if you are not able to cover everything you intended, as long as the meeting is productive. I’ve also seen salespeople cut someone off and move on to a new slide rather than discussing something of substance. I was actually told once by a sales leader that five minutes of discussion is all that is required in an initial 30-minute meeting, because our goal is to pique their interest. That approach just doesn’t work. You may impress them, but if you don’t start building confidence that you can help them, there probably won’t be a second call.
7. Next steps. Keep in mind that your time is valuable, and qualifying out a prospect who is not a good fit is essential – it helps you avoid false hopes and lets you focus on people who might genuinely need your help. The next meeting could go many ways, but it’s best to ask the prospect. Would they like to expand the audience? Is there a specific issue they would like to address? Would they like a product demo or a technical discussion? Is something like a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) keeping them from opening up? Lack of engagement on their part is a huge clue. Be direct and ask the tough questions now to avoid wasting valuable time and effort later.
Here is a mini success story. In 2010, my team and I began selling the first commercial vector high-performance analytics database. Several products were already out that claimed to be 70x-100x faster than others. Our pitch was that we were 70 times faster than other products. That was self-limiting from the start and likely prevented people from contacting us.
After two months of minimal success (I closed a deal with a small hedge fund, which was the only sale in all regions), we started a weekly webinar called “Why Fast Matters.” The focus was on positive business outcomes rather than specific technology and features (“speeds and feeds”). We opened with some “What if?” statements, such as: What if you get answers from complex queries faster than your competitors? What if you could do that without the cost, complexity, delays, and limitations of a Star Schema or pre-aggregated data? What if you could do this on commodity x86 hardware? We would then briefly cover the breakthrough technology (a precursor to Snowflake) and offer a free half-day meeting with a consultant.
Within the first two weeks, we met with a company that was later acquired by PayPal shortly before eBay acquired PayPal. This company was about to spend $500K on a proprietary hardware expansion that would have only provided additional capacity for the following year. Their customers bought advertising based on queries against the last six months of their data. I asked the question, “What if they could query against five years of data and get answers faster than they do today? Do you think that would help them buy more advertising? Do your customers ever ask for this?” They said their customers frequently ask for 12 months of data and would be willing to pay more for these capabilities. Still, they did not have a way to do this cost-effectively.
I closed a $360K ARR subscription deal in two weeks, and they purchased $100K of commodity Dell hardware for our software to run on. They saved 8% over their planned purchase, and more importantly, they rolled out advanced querying capabilities (against six years of data) in less than a month. There was incredible value to them and their customers, and it generated more business for them. We wouldn’t have identified this need if we’d focused primarily on features and technology.
As an aside, I was initially chastised for going off message, but after the Australian team adopted our approach and began closing deals, it became the new corporate standard. If something isn’t working, focus on finding ways to improve it. Even incremental change can be meaningful.
In the words of Tony Robbins, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”
Finding the Right Fit in Sales
I won’t sell a product or service if I don’t believe in it or in the company behind it. But that is only part of the picture. Not all products or services fit everybody, but most fit somebody. Qualification matters, and qualifying accurately and quickly helps you earn more money. Whether you are a seller or leading a sales team, understanding the best-fit use cases can help you build your ICP and a repeatable sales motion, allowing you to:
- Find and prospect the best candidate companies.
- Demonstrate benefits for a credible and relevant use case.
- Find a sponsor who benefits from your offering.
- Accelerate the deal velocity – even in a large enterprise business.
- Close large deals faster – and more of them!
When I started selling at my last company, I was told that the typical deal size was $75K-$80K, with a 9-12 month sales cycle at a midsize company. I sold a Kubernetes Fleet Management platform, and I quickly found that most midsize companies lacked the containerization needs Kubernetes provides. Most also needed to gain the skills required for fairly complex solutions, which can take months. So, a great solution for some may not be the solution for all.
Large Enterprise companies had the need and the expertise to support Kubernetes, which started my profile development exercise. Large companies with a corporate-standard containerization product were less likely candidates, with a much longer sales cycle. Financial Services companies require strong end-to-end security and cannot afford breaches (reputationally and actual costs). Therefore, they had larger budgets and immediate needs, so they became a primary focus.
While looking at these companies’ environments, it became clear to me that with the right targeting, an initial deal could easily be in the $500K-$1 million range. And, if you successfully delivered what you promised, there could be several more significant follow-on deals. The icing on the cake is that by selling those companies what they need, solving significant problems or concerns, and treating them like the valued customers they are, they would reward you with loyalty and long-term business. That became my focus, and my assumptions proved to be accurate.
Finding the right fit for your product or service takes analysis, investigation, testing, and time. Getting this right creates the perfect opportunity for ongoing success and to scale results across the entire team. It also provides credibility when customers are willing to speak with prospects and sing your praises. Success breeds success.
What are you doing to improve CX today?
In challenging times, minor frustrations can lead to harmful, long-term negative sentiment. Your approach to Customer Experience (CX) matters more than ever during this pandemic crisis. Your business needs to protect relationship capital and see this as an opportunity to appeal to your next generation of loyal customers.
Recently, I sold a few gold coins on an auction website. The transactions were great and concluded quickly. However, the payment arm of this organization appears to have a bug in its tracking system for USPS Registered Mail. The transaction status displayed “shipped,” but when you clicked the “Tracking” button, it was clear the package had been delivered a few weeks earlier. Still, they were holding a significant amount of money without a clear release date.
While that was a little frustrating, what happened next changed my feelings about this company. I sent several emails to Support and received canned responses. I used their chat option and spoke to a couple of “people” who were either chatbots or should be replaced by chatbots, because no matter what information I provided, the response was always the same and not helpful.
Now, think about tens, hundreds, or even thousands of customers or prospects having problems getting information about your products and services, getting assistance with questions or support for problems, and working with your company in general. In times of increased stress, uncertainty, or competition, the customer experience for each anticipated archetype must be as ideal as possible to increase engagement and loyalty.
Consistently positive interactions, from interactions with branding and marketing, to the customer journey, to onboarding new customers, to successful implementations and support, increase lifetime customer value, repeat business, and overall business growth. Every touchpoint should increase your emotional connection with that customer.
I’ve always told my teams that “People buy easy,” so, as a group or organization, we aim to make it as efficient and frictionless as possible to conduct business with us. By doing that, being fair, and acting with integrity, we earn loyal customers who support our business’s growth.
Relationships develop over time, and each interaction helps determine the eventual outcome. Understanding what differentiates your company and products in your customers’ and prospects’ eyes can help you create more meaningful, consistent, and valuable interactions. People appreciate a positive customer experience, so those efforts may ultimately lead to developing Customers for Life.
Now is the time to evaluate your end-to-end processes, procedures, guidelines, and interfaces. Be extremely critical as you ask yourself, “Is this how I would like to be treated as a customer?” By making CX a strategic priority, your business or organization will eliminate friction and ensure customers are treated well and feel valued. Moreover, as you increase install base loyalty and engagement, you will be rewarded with renewals, expansion, references, referrals, and suggestions to improve your products. Everyone wins.
Investments in CX today can deliver an immediate payback and increase long-term growth.
Where Ideas, Experiences, and Lessons Learned Intersect 