Appendix-Review
R.A.D.A.R.® Six P’s of Winning a Complex Sale
As described in detail in Hope Is Not A Strategy, R.A.D.A.R.® is an opportunity management process for controlling competitive evaluations involving politics, strategic solutions, competition, and decision-making processes by committees. This section provides greater detail on the six-P process, so that this book will be complete in itself. If you have already read Hope, this is a review.
In fact, how well and quickly you review and revise your plan is more important than the perfection of the original plan.
The first step in the process is to understand the client’s pain (or gain). What problem is the client trying to solve? A dormant pain is a problem clients don’t even know they have compared with an active pain that they have not only acknowledged but for which they are actively seeking a solution.
Active pains already have money budgeted and teams working with vendors to find a solution. But if you can uncover a dormant problem, elevate it to an active pain, and effectively link your solution to solving it, you gain competitive advantage.
When linking your solution to a benefit, remember to ask yourself what the customer is always thinking: “So what? What does it mean to me?” Failing to answer this question leaves the job of linking your solution to the client’s business pain up to the client, which results in a loss of control and perceived value of your solution. You need to make sure to sell strategic benefits to strategic buyers and sell technical benefits to tactical buyers.
How you qualify a prospect depends on the number of opportunities in your pipeline and your available resources. The first question you should ask yourself when qualifying a prospect is, “Will this business happen for anyone at all?”
Many deals are lost to “No decision.” This is so for two reasons: Either the business pain that you solve is not urgent enough to act upon or there is no political sponsor strong enough to push it through. The pain needs to be strong enough and emotional enough to drive change and create a source of urgency, or else the deal will sit on the forecast.
The next question should be, “Is this a good opportunity for us?” Keep in mind that in many evaluations the client has already decided who they are going to buy from.
There is a wide range of preference in complex sales ranging all the way from disclosure, where the client is telling you what you need to know to help you win, to the highest level, trust, where they’re buying whatever you’re selling. There is also a spectrum of negative preference, which ranges from skeptical to even open hostility.
The pain needs to be strong enough and emotional enough to drive change and create a source of urgency or else the deal will sit on the forecast.
In the last 20 years, some methodologies also have taught building preference with everybody. We disagree. First of all, there isn’t time. Second, it isn’t necessary. Third, it can actually be counterproductive. Not that we should ever alienate anyone, but based on the decision-making process and the roles people play, we can win the business by focusing our preference-building efforts on the people who have the most impact on the decision.
Building preference in all directions, without a strategy, is a waste of time. Selling to everyone equally not only spreads your efforts too thin, but it can help the competition. For example, the people down on the hostile end of the scale are probably too far gone. The other problem is that they often don’t act hostile. They may be very nice to you, when, in fact, they are taking everything you give them and passing it straight to the competition.
In account strategy sessions, we see people pounding away on these antagonists in the hope of winning everyone’s vote, sending pounds and pounds of literature and wasting sales calls. Based on the decision-making process, if a complete consensus is not required, we may be able to win without their vote. They may not even have a vote.
And don’t confuse access or politeness with preference. Just because they will meet with you and are nice to you doesn’t mean they will sponsor you. The quality of relationships, from the salesperson’s view, is the most frequently misread and overestimated part of a salesperson’s plan.
You need to know not only if people are for you but also how strongly they are for you. When the pressure builds, you need to know if they are going to fold their cards.
To build competitive preference in an opportunity, you have to establish the political point of entry and then effectively differentiate your company and solution and build positive mindshare with key influencers — before your competition does it.
At the account level, building preference in the long run means overdelivering on what you sold them. Then you need to move from loyalty to trust by never giving them a reason to go to anyone else. You have to make your sponsors look good for having chosen you.
Before you can drive an effective strategy, you have to understand the client’s decision-making process. This is different from the client’s evaluation process. It is also different from the approval process (see Figure A-1).
