Marketing
What are you Really Selling? (hint – solutions)
It is interesting to see Sales and Marketing people still focusing on features, performance, cost, and even value without creating a linkage to what that means to a company from a business perspective. Once you understand what your prospect is buying and why they need it, you can connect with them meaningfully to increase your win rate.
A sales adage from the 1940s (source) asserts, “No one wants a drill. What they want is the hole.” Today, that basic understanding of why people and companies buy is often lost in sales and marketing messages. Sales success is all about solving problems and satisfying needs.
Several years ago, my team and I were selling a new Analytics Database that was genuinely different. Still, our message was identical to every other database vendor – “70% – 100% faster than every other product.” It is nearly impossible to differentiate your product using a non-differentiated message. Don’t treat your product or service as a commodity if it is not one.
I flipped the messaging to focus on business needs. We created a weekly webinar focused on Why Fast Matters. Query response time is important, but responsiveness to customer needs and requests is essential. What if they did not need to wait a week or two to have new indexes created or a month to have a Star Schema updated? They could just run queries as-is, maybe wait a minute instead of a second or two, and have what they need then and there. That message resonated; we sold the first 50% of that product globally. When the Australian team began using our messaging, their sales also increased. Funny how that works.
Effectiveness is all about results and intended outcomes. Efficiency is about achieving those results with the least time and effort invested. It doesn’t mean that we are looking for a lazy approach to find a win. Instead, it is about identifying repeatable patterns that circumvent unnecessary activities, accelerate the sales cycle, and minimize related costs.
The way to help yourself understand what you are selling is to view things from your prospect’s perspective. What struggles are they likely facing? Where are the greatest opportunities to help their type of business? Are you analyzing data to attempt to assess their unmet needs? Your insight can become a huge differentiator, especially if you can teach them different and better ways to do something (ala the Challenger Sales Model).
What is the difference between your prospect company and its main competition? This analysis requires a general understanding of the problem space and a more specific understanding of the prospect company, its history, and 2-3 main competitors. It also requires an honest account of how your company and products compare to the competition so that you can play up your strengths and limit your investment in areas where the fit is not as good.
The next item to focus on is messaging. Below are a few examples from my career –
- Analytics & Big Data – The focus here is often on data volume, the currency of the data, speed of queries, cost, maintenance, and downtime. Those things become essential later in the sales discussion, but initially, companies want to know what problems their product or solution will solve.
- Some of my fastest deals sold because I demonstrated ways to make better decisions faster and/or identify minor problems before they had the chance to become major problems. Avoiding problems and unplanned outages were critical elements of the messaging.
- In one case, I closed a significant deal in less than three months by focusing on how a company could provide customers with five years of transactional data. Those customers could use the data to make better purchasing decisions in less time than it took the current system to analyze six months of data. Their sales increased after implementing this modernized system. Helping their customers make better buying decisions faster was the winning message.
- Embedded Products – While many companies focus on APIs, features, or cost per unit, I would focus on how the product I was selling made things better and easier to manage for improved Customer Support and Customer Satisfaction.
- I closed a $1.1 million deal in less than two months to a medical device company by focusing on the life cycle of those devices (often 10-15 years) and how their customers needed consistency from machine to machine. Consistency over time was the winning message here.
- After being approached by a Defense Contractor for a relational database product for a new Flight Simulator system, I changed the discussion to the complexity of flight control systems, the need to correlate 30+ operational systems in real-time, and the importance of taking a verbal command and translating it to specific commands for each related system. That led to selling a NoSQL product ideally suited for this complex environment. Letting our software handle the highly complex workload helped us win this deal.
- Consulting Services – These were not contracting or body shop services (commodities) but actual Business and Technical Consulting services with high visibility and impact. In these cases, expertise, experience, and having a track record of success in different but demanding scenarios provided confidence. These were often multi-phase engagements to prove our value before making a significant commitment.
- In a bid against two well-established competitors, we won a deal with a large Petroleum company worth nearly $500K. The proposal included information we uncovered about the system and use case and later verified with the prospect, a section on our people and past projects, and a high-level project plan with firm-fixed pricing. We won the bid, and I later discovered that our cost was $50K higher than the largest competitor and $100K more than the other competitor. The customer told me, “Your proposal demonstrated the understanding of who we are and what we need, and that confidence provided the justification to select your company and pay a premium to have the job done right the first time.”
- My first million-dollar deal was with a company where we demonstrated our ability to solve problems. They knew they needed assistance but were not exactly sure where. I created a “Pool of Days” concept that provided flexibility in the work performed (task, deliverables, and scheduling) but had minimum monthly burn rates and an expiration date to protect my company. The winning messaging this time was that flexibility and the ability to accommodate changing needs without introducing significant risk or additional cost were better ways to buy consulting services. This approach led to many other deals of a similar nature with other companies.
The common theme is helping companies solve their specific business problems from these examples. Even when technology was central to the message, focusing on better outcomes for that prospect and their customers was essential. Value matters, but positive results and better outcomes matter even more for purchasing decisions.
Nobody wants to be responsible for taking a chance on a new vendor and be responsible for a high-profile failure. Helping instill confidence early on makes a huge difference, and following through to successful implementation results in happy customers who become loyal customers who provide references and referrals.
Success starts with selling what you can do from a business perspective for your Prospects. You are solving their problems with solutions they need and avoid getting lost in the noise of the unfocused messaging from most of your competition.
Good Selling!
What’s the prize if I win?
In consulting and in business, there is a tendency to believe that if you show someone how to find that proverbial “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” they will be motivated to do so. Seasoned professionals will tend to ask, “What problem are you trying to solve?” to understand whether there is a real opportunity. If you cannot quickly, clearly, and concisely articulate the problem, and why this helps solve it, it is often game over then and there (N.B. It pays to be prepared). But, having the right answer is not a guarantee of moving forward.
Unfortunately, sometimes a mere pot of gold just isn’t enough to motivate. Sometimes it takes something different, and usually something personal. It’s more, “What’s in this for me?” No, I am not talking about bribes, kickbacks, or anything illegal or unethical. This is about determining what is really important to the decision maker and in what priority, and then demonstrating that the proposed solution will bring them closer to achieving their personal goals. What’s in it for them?
Case in point. Several years ago I was trying to sell a packaged Business Intelligence (BI) system developed on our database platform to customers most likely to have a need. Qualification performed – check. Interested – check. Proof of value – check. Quick ROI – check. Close the deal – not so fast…
This application was a set of dashboards with 150-200 predefined KPIs (key performance indicators). The premise was that you could quickly tailor and deploy the new BI system with little risk (finding and validating the data needed was available to support the KPI was the biggest risk, but one that could be identified up-front) and about half the cost of what a similar typical implementation would cost. Who wouldn’t want one?
I spent several days onsite with the prospect, identified areas of concern and opportunity, and used their data to quantify the potential benefit. Before the end of the week, I was able to show the potential to get an 8x ROI in the first year. Remember, this was estimated using their data, not figures I just created. Being somewhat conservative, I suggested that even half that amount would be a big success. Look – we found the pot of gold!
Despite this, the deal never closed. This company had a lot of money, and this CIO had a huge budget. Saving $500K+ would be nice but was not essential. What I learned later was that this person was pushing forward an initiative of his own that was highly visible. This new system had the potential to become a distraction, and he did not need that. Had I made this determination sooner, I could have easily repositioned it to align with his agenda.
For example, the focus of the system could have shifted from financial savings to project and risk management for his higher priority initiative. The KPIs could be on earned value, scheduling, and deliverables. This probably would have sold as it would have been far more appealing to this CIO and supported what was important to him (i.e., his prize if he wins). The additional financial savings initially identified would be the icing on the cake, to be applied later.
There were several lessons learned from this effort. In this instance, I focused on my personal pot of gold (based on logic and common sense) rather than on my customer’s priorities and prize for winning. That mistake cost me this deal, but it is one I have not made since – helping me win many other deals.
The Power of Simplicity
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein
In the first part of my career, I didn’t care much for consultants. My experience was that they would come in, tell you what to do, and then leave victoriously while we were stuck trying to implement something that just wouldn’t work. They seemed to make everything seem so complex—often to justify their cost.
Then, I met an amazing consultant who shared something valuable with me. He explained what he believed differentiated a true consultant from a contractor (something I wrote about a decade later in a Tech Republic article). He then made me aware of the Einstein quote above. This was one of those pivotal moments in my career.
For many years, I have met many interesting people. Some seemed to try to intentionally obfuscate even the easiest things to make themselves seem brilliant. Others took such a circuitous route that you sometimes forgot what you were trying to understand and fix. And sometimes explanations were just so tangential that the main point was lost entirely. There are likely many reasons for these experiences – some intentional and many not. The real lesson learned is that it wasn’t just consultants who can be incomprehensible and that clear and comprehensible communication is critical to effectiveness.
Just think about the power of a well-crafted “elevator pitch” when you meet someone new or the ability to quickly explain how your company differentiates itself from the competition (making you the more interesting, better, or safer choice in your prospect’s mind). Or being able to articulate your business strategy in a way that people understand (and can explain to others), which also interests them enough to want to learn more and become part of making that happen.
The best consultants, as do the best employees, managers, executives, and business owners, have this ability to explain something simply. While this is only one attribute of success (likability, powers of persuasion, integrity, luck, etc. are others), it is something that can be taught, developed, and consistently applied.
The power to “explain it simply” is the power to make a difference through better understanding.
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