Unfortunately, too many people either get too focused on delivery of the first project to radiate out or they havethe hall pass and get stuck in their comfort zone, calling on people who are already sold. In addition, sales “hunters” hurry down the road to the next prospect company because what is qualified for long-term account management is not qualified for a short-term quarterly-driven “hunter.” This is why “hunters” usually don’t make good account managers.
Collaborate
One way to elevate your value from commodity to strategic is to collaborate with the client on product or strategic initiatives. This requires working on issues other than just your product. It may mean logistics, marketing, codesign, new markets, integration, or innovation.
This is a very powerful model for raising value and has led to technology tools for product configuration, change orders, design, and collaboration through an entire supply chain.
I meet a lot of sales managers on airplanes. I remember flying into Minneapolis, sitting next to a sales manager for a paper company.
Of course, I asked him, “Isn’t it hard to sell a commodity like paper these days?”
He responded, “I have about 1,200 other salespeople in the commodity division. What I do is co-design specialty papers for clients with unique needs. I’m meeting with 3M tomorrow to collaborate on papers for products that we will both produce two years from now. The margins are much higher.
Likewise, later that year, I sat beside a carpet salesman, flying into Washington, D.C., who was meeting with Marriott Corporation to design special carpets for hotels they would build throughout the world over the next few years.
“It’s the only way we could get out of the commodity business,” he said.
Elevate
Elevate your executive relationships to trust and your solutions to the strategic.
A few years ago, one of our principals, Jon Hauck, was in a presentation with a sales rep who was presenting to the president of a major division of MCI and two of his lieutenants.
The lieutenants had prepared and coached them for the presentation, which was to last an hour. This was the big day! They thought they knew the president’s key issues, which could be addressed by their slick sales dashboard that would provide significant visibility into the forecast.
But just 20 minutes into the presentation, they could see that the president was tuning out. Though the rep was doing a very nice job, unfortunately, the only heads that were nodding were his and those of the lieutenants. Jon reached over, closed the laptop, and asked the president if visibility into the forecast was what really concerned him most.
“Yes,” he said. “But you’ve missed the issue. In the Telco space, forecasting revenue is not about when it’s sold, but when the switch is turned on. That’s what I need to forecast. I already know what my sales are going to be.”
With that, they immediately changed direction and probed a little deeper into his actual issue.
He cordially explained it, and they artfully created the linkage from the benefits of their solution to solving his true pain. This took about 13 minutes.
When they told him they could do what he needed, the deal was done. He told his sales operations manager to get with them, define the scope, and tell him how much to spend.
Two weeks later, they had a contract for over $500k.
STAY INVOLVED—DELIVER WHAT YOU SOLD
Early in the implementation of the State of Texas payroll system, Joe Terry, then the salesperson on the account, ran into a potential two-week delay to get the system installed because the client’s database manager was going to be on vacation and would miss the installation training class.
The next class was not to be held for another month, but the database manager refused to change his vacation schedule. At the project level, the project manager had chosen to simply let the delay stand.
Joe went to the deputy controller and explained the hidden cost of having the 30 people on the project team stand idle for a month while the project was on hold: $720,000.
That was a pretty expensive vacation.
The controller interjected himself in the process to prevent the delay, but just as important, Joe gained trusted advisor status with the controller. This access proved to be crucial as the project ran into the normal problems that can sometimes escalate out of control.
Many salespeople reach the executive level to get the sale and then leave the support team to work at the lower levels of the account. Sometimes the problem is actually the customer’s. By maintaining the access and relationships at the executive level, after the sale, Joe was able to save the customer from themselves without going over the project team’s head—he was already there.
He elevated the relationship to trust by staying involved in delivering what he sold and saved the executive from embarrassment.
One client executive of Deloitte’s came to them and said, “We need to do something about increasing revenues.”
At the time, Deloitte had developed a process called a Value Map that allowed them to break processes into different areas. When they mapped the client’s problem to the Value Map, they saw that none of the projects the client wanted done addressed revenue at all.
The real initiative was that the client needed to cut costs. The client was asking Deloitte for the wrong thing.
When dealing with someone from a strategic standpoint, before you ask, “Are you doing the thing right?” you have to ask, “Are you doing the right thing?”
Dominate
Dominate doesn't mean manipulating the client. It means changing the client's decision-making process to give you the inside track as a preferred vendor. This will occur only because of lowered risk through superior performance and relationships. It means building company-to-company trust, in which the client doesn't have to put you out for competitive evaluations every time, or if they must, you get the inside track or high ground before it begins.
Inoculate
To inoculate means to provide solutions that are «sticky» — solutions that have a high switching cost so that moving away from your organization is not easy. This moves you out of the commodity relationship into a symbiotic relationship where you need each other.
What is qualified for long-term account management is not qualified for a short-term quarterly-driven "hunter."
It also means building allies and listening posts for competitive intrusions because competitors will try to penetrate your account the same way you did in the first place. If you do account management well enough, you may not have to do opportunity management at all, or if you do, you are well established on the issues and have powerful people who prefer you before a formal buying process begins.
Coaching: The Key to Organizational Sales Discipline
Additionally, the salespeople who grew up in the 1990s are now sales managers. In many cases, we've taken our best salespeople and made them managers with little preparation. You can't afford to take two years to send them away to earn an MBA, and that wouldn't work anyway. In MBA school, they teach you how to be a vice president and how to analyze problems—not execute solutions.
What sales managers are really asking for at this stage are tactical skills and training for new managers on how to hire effectively, coach performance, weed out weak people, and develop future leaders. Otherwise, you are taking sales-people—whose strengths as salespeople not only may not work for them as managers but might actually work against them — and promoting them.
As managers, they then clone more salespeople with bad habits. At the same time, there is a whole new generation of salespeople out there who not only need the fundamental skills of selling but also need to understand the complexities of committee sales and major accounts.