Customers
are increasingly circumventing salespeople. They’re using publicly available
information to diagnose their own needs and turning to sophisticated
procurement departments and third-party purchasing consultants to help them
extract the best possible deals from suppliers. The trend will only accelerate.
For sales, this isn’t just another long, hot summer; it’s wholesale climate
change.
Top-performing
reps have abandoned the conventional “solution selling” and replaced it with “insight selling”. This
new sales strategy demands a fundamentally different approach across several
areas of the purchasing process.
Customers
are coming to the negotiating table armed with a deep understanding of their
problem(s) and a well-scoped RFP for a solution. It’s turning many of our sales
conversations into fulfillment conversations. Reps must learn to engage
customers much earlier, well before customers fully understand their own needs.
Most
organizations tell their salespeople to give priority to customers whose senior
management meets three criteria:
- The
customer has a need for change.
- The
customer has a clear vision of its goals.
- The customer has a well-established
processes for making purchasing decisions.
These three
criteria are easily observable, for the most part, and reps and their leaders
habitually rely on them to predict the likelihood and progress of potential
deals.
Top-performing
reps place little value on such traditional predictors. Instead, they emphasize
two nontraditional criteria.
- They put
a premium on customer agility: Can a customer act quickly and decisively when
presented with a compelling case, or is it hamstrung by structures and
relationships that stifle change?
- They
pursue customers that have an emerging need or are in a state of organizational
flux, whether because of external pressures, such as regulatory reform, or
because of internal pressures, such as a recent acquisition, a leadership
turnover, or widespread dissatisfaction with current practices. Since they’re
already reexamining the status quo, these customers are looking for insights
and are naturally more receptive to the disruptive ideas that top- performers
bring to the table.
In
conventional sales training reps are taught to find an advocate, or coach,
within the customer organization to help them get the deal done. They’re given
a list of attributes to look for. The description below suggests that the ideal
advocate:
- is
accessible and willing to meet when asked
- provides
valuable information that’s typically unavailable to outside suppliers
- is
predisposed to support the supplier’s solution
- is good
at influencing others
- speaks
the truth
- is
considered credible by colleagues
- conveys
new ideas to colleagues in savvy, persuasive ways
- delivers
on commitments
- stands to
personally gain from the sale
- will help
reps network and connect with other stakeholders
It turns
out that this idealized advocate doesn’t actually exist. Each attribute can
probably be found somewhere in a customer organization, but rarely all come
together in one person. So reps find themselves settling for someone who has
some of them. And when choosing an advocate most reps walk right past the very
people who could help them get the deal done, the people top-performers have
learned to recognize and rely on.
Customer
stakeholders can be classified according to 135 attributes and perspectives.
The distinct
stakeholder profile gives the relative
ability of individuals of each type to build consensus and drive action around
a large corporate purchase or initiative. The profiles aren’t mutually
exclusive; most people have attributes of more than one.
Every
stakeholder has a primary posture when it comes to working with suppliers and
spearheading organizational change.
1.
Go-Getters. Motivated by organizational improvement and constantly looking for
good ideas, Go-Getters champion action around great insights wherever they find
them.
2.
Teachers. Passionate about sharing insights, Teachers are sought out by colleagues
for their input. They’re especially good at persuading others to take a
specific course of action.
3.
Skeptics. Wary of large, complicated projects, Skeptics push back on almost
everything. Even when championing a new idea, they counsel careful, measured
implementation.
4. Guides.
Willing to share the organization’s latest gossip, Guides furnish information
that’s typically unavailable to outsiders.
5. Friends.
Just as nice as the name suggests, Friends are readily accessible and will
happily help reps network with other stakeholders in the organization.
6.
Climbers. Focused primarily on personal gain, Climbers back projects that will
raise their own profiles, and they expect to be rewarded when those projects
succeed.
7.
Blockers. Perhaps better described as “anti-stakeholders,” Blockers are
strongly oriented toward the status quo. They have little interest in speaking
with outside vendors.
Average
reps gravitate toward three stakeholder profiles, and top-performers gravitate
toward three others.
Average
reps typically connect with Guides, Friends, and Climbers, types that we can group
together as Talkers. These people are personable and accessible and they share
company information freely, all of which makes them very appealing. But if your
goal is to close a deal, not just have a chat, Talkers won’t get you very far:
They’re often poor at building the consensus necessary for complex purchasing
decisions. Ironically, traditional sales training pushes reps into the arms of
Talkers thus reinforcing the very underperformance companies seek to improve.
The
profiles that top-performers pursue, Go-Getters, Teachers, and Skeptics, are
far better at generating consensus. We can refer to them as Mobilizers. A
conversation with a Mobilizer isn’t necessarily easy. Because Mobilizers are
focused first and foremost on driving productive change for their company, that’s
what they want to talk about, their company, not yours. In fact, in many ways
Mobilizers are deeply supplier-agnostic. They’re less likely to get behind a
particular supplier than behind a particular insight. Reps who rely on a
traditional features-and-benefits sales approach will probably fail to engage
Mobilizers.
Endless
questioning and needs diagnosis are of no value to Mobilizers. They don’t want
to be asked what keeps them awake at night; they’re looking for outside experts
to share insights about what their company should do, and they’re engaged by
big, disruptive ideas. Yet upon hearing those ideas, Mobilizers ask a lot of
tough questions, Go-Getters because they want to do, Teachers because they want
to share, and Skeptics because they want to test.
Many sales reps
will ignore the commotion and stick with solution selling, and their customers
will increasingly reject them. But top-performers seeking out customers that
are primed for change, challenging them with provocative insights, and coaching
them on how to buy, will become indispensable. They may still be selling
solutions, but more broadly, they’re selling insights.
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| Difference between Solution Selling an Insight Selling |
