Two Guys Meet, One Gets Sold.

Whoa!  Building sales momentum at a young company is all consuming.  But man is it fun!  Sorry for the hiatus.

I was lucky enough to start my sales career at a time when many companies had proper sales training programs.  They hired young people right out of college and put them through a rigorous program made up of self study, on the job training and classroom instruction.  Companies with good programs included IBM, HP, ADP, NCR, Kodak and Burroughs but the program upon which they were all based was the Xerox Sales Training Methodology.  The curriculum included technology, product and sales training and it provided a great foundation.  It’s harder to find these programs today (and we sales managers are the worse for it as we try to verify that a recruit has learned the fundamentals).  But today I am writing about the first thing you were required to do upon arriving at corporate for your two week training class: The Verbatim.

Usually a recruit had spent between 3 and 6 weeks at their local branch office learning the basics, beginning to make calls and preparing for the trip to corporate.  Upon arriving, they took a product knowledge test and delivered their verbatim presentation to the instructors.  If they failed either they went home and most never returned, so there was a lot of angst on that first day.  Most were pretty comfortable taking the multiple choice product test but presenting a word for word, keystroke for keystroke demonstration to a stern set of instructors while your classmates watched was frightening.  And what good was it anyway?  No one ever delivers the verbatim in a real customer situation, do they? Everyone customizes the presentation to their own style and to the customer’s needs.  Isn’t this just busy work to push you out of your comfort zone and give the instructors the upper hand at the beginning of class?  What a waste, right?  Wrong!

I don’t think I ever gave the verbatim word for word to a customer, but when I ran into a heckler who took me off my game or an objection that took us down a rat hole, I always had the verbatim to bring me back to the message.  I thought of it as my “Rock of Gibraltar” (seriously, I used that term in my mind).  From then on, I always work to simplify the flow of the message for anything I’m selling into a clear path that I know cold.  If I was making cold phone calls, I wrote out a script and had it in front of me during the session, even after I had done it hundreds of times.  I never read it verbatim (think of Arthur Fonzarelli selling encyclopedias “Hello Sir, Madam or small child…”), but it was always there.  Not an elevator pitch, rather a structured conversation broken into a number of clear sections.  If you find yourself lost, you can jump to the beginning of the section most pertinent to the current topic and you are back on solid ground, arms firmly wrapped around your Rock of Gibraltar.

If you read my bio, you can see that I spent ten or so years at a company named Parametric Technology Corporation (today PTC).  We had a run of growth across that ten years that was remarkable.  Early on, we settled on five key points about our solution that were compelling to customers and that differentiated us from the competition.  Every new sales person at PTC learned those five key points and how to present them and, luckily for us, they didn’t change for ten years!  I was recently at an event with a number of other alumni from back then and although many of us had left the company fifteen years ago or more, we could all still quote the five key points:

1. Parametric
2. Feature Based
3. Associative
4. Assemblies
5. Relationships

Magic!  

What is your Rock?  Do you have a script?  You should.

Image by Vince Vassallo via http://vincevassallo.blogspot.ca/

Please comment.  It would be great to have a conversation about selling and to hear a funny story or two.  I will moderate but the good news (for all of us) is I have a day job in the real world.  So if I don’t reply instantly, feel free to talk amongst yourselves until I get back .

I had an economics professor named Father Hohmann.  He was a Jesuit Catholic priest with short white hair that still managed to be unkempt, a smoker’s gravelly voice and a wicked Boston accent.  He approached the principles of macro-economics by contrasting the commodities of “guns and buttah”.  He was also fond of saying “econawmics is nawt an exact science”.  Well neither is sales and it’s all the customer’s fault.

Over the years, I’ve had many conversations with members of the finance team asking me, “how can we get the sales team to bring orders in evenly over the month or quarter?”  Those pesky customers!  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve frustrated engineering by emphatically agreeing to a product roadmap only to change direction at precisely the wrong moment as they diligently executed their detailed plan to deliver the original feature-set on time and on budget. Those pesky customers! The finance and engineering folks are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do and what they’ve been trained to do.  If it wasn’t for customers, businesses would run much more smoothly.  Wait a minute…

So what should sales be doing?  Well, to morph the  words of German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke a bit, “No business plan survives contact with the customer” and sales needs to be comfortable with the chaos at the front line.  Too many sales people simply act as a communications wire between the company and the customer, that’s not selling.  Sales has to broker a middle ground that in the end results in the best outcome for both parties.  Picture Tom Brady (American football quarterback, similar to scrumhalf in rugby) at the line of scrimmage with the play clock ticking down and the defense disguising their plans by moving and changing as each second ticks by.  Tom doesn’t panic, he’s not surprised by what the other team is doing he expects it, he’s comfortable even energized in his role.  Under intense pressure, he finds the right compromise between what the other team will give him and what his team is capable of and he executes.  If you aren’t comfortable at the intersection of success and failure, even thrilled to be there, managing the chaos under pressure, sales might not be for you.  Because that’s the job.  And it all starts with a relationship with the source of the chaos, those pesky customers.

A few years back I was in an uncommon position as the “economic buyer” for pretty big CRM replacement.  Because we were swapping out a system that was at the core of our business, we spent most of our time focussing on how the new system could handle many complex internal processes.  We worked closely with the chosen vendor, negotiated fair pricing and told them we were ready to place a pretty large order at the end of their fiscal year.  At the last minute, quite innocently, I introduced change by asking them for pricing to include their channel portal capability so that we could share data with our partners.  The quote came back in the high tens of dollars per partner per year, which when multiplied by our tens of thousands of active channel partners over doubled the license costs!  Stop the presses, surely this must be a mistake.  The vendor sales team, on the brink of victory, rushed back to their product management team to validate the quote.  They came back with this logic: the cost per partner per year was less than the margin earned by either the partner or the vendor on just one small deal.  Comparing this to the annual value of the portal, it seemed like a fair price.  Sounds reasonable and maybe it was, but when multiplied by tens of thousands of units, my perspective as the customer was that the price was doubling just so I could use my own data, this would not fly in the real world.  To their credit, the vendor sales team read the situation, worked to represent the customer view to their business folks and found a pricing structure that increased the size of the sale but not close to double, all before the clock ran out.  They had the necessary relationships, could communicate the nuances of each side’s perspective and, most of all, could present a vision of a win/win long term partnership.  Well done!

One last thing.  Too many sales people quote the old saw “the customer is always right” when working internally to respond to questions and objections.  Well guess what? The customer is not always right!  In fact, the customer doesn’t even want to be always right.  They want to learn.  They want vendors to challenge them and to bring the perspective of a domain expert to the conversation.  They want to hear about new ways to solve their most vexing problems and they want to be told, in a convincing way that’s backed up with facts, why an alternative approach might be better for them in the long run.  Like why it might be better to let engineering finish the cycle they are currently in and then add their new requests ASAP after that.  Those pesky customers appreciate being part of tough business decisions that in the fullness of time, will be better for everyone. Tweet

Image by Vince Vassallo via http://vincevassallo.blogspot.ca/

Please comment.  It would be great to have a conversation about selling and to hear a funny story or two.  I will moderate but the good news (for all of us) is I have a day job in the real world.  So if I don’t reply instantly, feel free to talk amongst yourselves until I get back .