Posts

Buying Lessons from a Master Salesman

/1 Comment/in /by

I spent some time in South Florida this weekend with Sam, a retired former rep for a national clothing manufacturer—that is, he wholesaled clothing lines to retail stores and chains. His territory was New York.  Here’s what he taught me about buying.

How Buyers Say They Buy–from Expertise

A few years ago, he got a terrible pain in his left knee.  Three doctors in a row said he needed either a knee replacement or arthroscopic surgery.  A fourth doctor said he suspected it was actually a hip problem which caused a pinched nerve, which resulted in knee pain.

“I’m not a hip guy,” said doc four, “but my new young colleague is.  I’d like you to have a chat with him.  “Fine,” said Sam, “anything to get rid of this debilitating pain so I can get back to tennis and golf.”

“The doctor was young,” Sam said.  “That was no problem.  But he wouldn’t look me in the eye. He told me it was a hip problem all right, and all those other fancy doctors had it wrong.  None of them had even taken an x-ray of my hip, but he did.”

“Problem was, I couldn’t get over him not looking me in the eye.  If a buyer or a seller won’t look the other in the eye, I just don’t trust him.  Kiss of death and all that.  So I says to him, ‘hey, I’m over here—who you talking to?’  He just said he was a distracted kind of guy, nothing to worry about.”

“But that’s exactly what I worry about.  So I went back to his boss, Doc 4, and I said no offense at all, I just think I’ll look for someone with a little more experience.”

I asked, “Sam, you told me you didn’t trust the guy; why didn’t you tell his boss?”

“Well,” Sam said, “I don’t want to be ruining some kid’s medical career, so I just made a plausible excuse.”

And there you have it.  Sam—a highly experienced and successful salesman, basically says people buy on trust, including him.  And yet, when asked by the seller (Doctor #4) why he didn’t buy, he lied—he said it was lack of experience.  He didn’t tell the truth–which is that he didn’t trust the young doctor.

How Buyers Really Buy–From Trust

So it always is.  Sellers think buyers buy on expertise; they don’t.  They buy on trust.  And when they ask buyers why they didn’t buy, the buyers claim it was on expertise.  And since that’s the answer sellers want to hear, they believe it. 

The truth is otherwise.  As Jeffrey Gitomer puts it, people buy with the heart, and rationalize it with their brain.  We overrate the importance of processes–and underrate the importance of connection. 

The irony is that young doc was right.  Sam underwent arthroscopic knee surgery with a high-reputation doctor in South Florida, and the result was nothing but more pain. 

A year later, Sam visited a hip specialist in NY who diagnosed hip troubles just by watching Sam walk.  He got a hip replacement two months later, and shot a 47 on the front nine a few weeks ago–pain free.

The young doc was right.  Unfortunately–So What.  He treated the patient like a case study, not a human being.

Sam would be the first to tell you: being right is vastly overrated.  Earning the right to have people believe you’re right—that’s where the trust comes in. 

That’s trust.  That’s how people buy.  That’s good selling.  
 

The Shortest Route to Sales is Not the Direct Route

/13 Comments/in /by

I’m told that the old tale of the frog in boiling water is false.  Supposedly, a frog placed in a pot of cold water will stay put, even when the water is gradually heated—all the way up to the point that the frog itself boils along with the water.

Even if it isn’t true, it ought to be.  Because it’s a wonderful metaphor for the biggest single thing wrong with sales.
 

The Single Biggest Mistake Made in Selling

Business in general, but particularly sales, has fallen into the trip of “more is more.”  More detail is better.  Greater frequency is better.  More measurement is better.  But gradually, like the mythical frog, the system can produce the opposite of what was intended.

The implicit assumption—increasingly explicit in large systems, projects and sales management tools like Salesforce.com—is that if you can break things down into constituent parts, then you can manage the whole just by micro-managing all the parts. 

This is not a dumb idea.  It’s the concept of division of labor; it’s what makes massive projects possible.  There’s a lot to like about it.

But there’s one huge thing wrong with it—the belief that the goal of the process is the sale itself.

Suppose you’re a customer.  Suppose the person selling to you is entirely driven by a system, process, and mindset that their goal is to get you to buy.  Now, if that is their over-riding goal, then by definition, your goals must take second place if there is ever a conflict. 

And oh, yes, there will be conflicts.  With sellers managing zillions of bytes, items, events, meetings, decisions, calls, qualifications, they frequently have to decide–shall we do what the customer wants?  Or what we want?  It’s a no-brainer for the system; make the decision that objectively maximizes the chance of us getting the sale.

By this view—the dominant view of selling—you the customer are an object, a poker chip in a competitive game.  No matter how good sellers are at interpersonal skills or consultative selling, the inescapable point of this approach is that the customer is a means to the seller’s ends. 

You may be thinking, ‘well, duh, that’s the nature of selling!”  Well, no, it isn’t.  It isn’t even the most effective approach to selling. Breaking down the process into innumerable smaller pieces doesn’t fool the customer–but, froglike, it allows the seller to believe he is effectively selling.
 

The Goal of Great Sellers is Not to Get the Sale

The whole problem arises from the beginning assumption that the goal of sales is to sell.   The really successful salespeople—whether in professional services or jet engines or new cars—realize the paradox at the heart of sales:

The true goal of sales is to help the customer.  The sale is a byproduct of helping the customer—not the goal itself.

The distinction is not trivial; it makes all the difference in the world.  If I as a customer learn that you are willing to put my needs ahead of your own, then—paradoxically—I trust you. 

And if I trust you, I will buy from you. 

That simple logic–you put my needs before yours, I trust you, I buy from you–turns out to yield more powerful sales results than the most elaborate of methodologies all aimed at achieving my needs first. 

The best sales systems/processes in the world are based on breaking down the process of getting a sale.  But in so doing, they break down the one critical element—trust—that drives the most, and the biggest, and the most profitable sales. 

It’s truly a paradox.  The best sales come from consciously not trying to get the sale, but in being willing to subordinate your interests to the customer’s. 

You get the most by trying not to get the most.  The best sales come from not trying to sell. 

Buddhism?   A Beatle song?  Maybe, but also a powerful business model.  And every great salesman knows the truth of it.

The problem is, all those pretty good salespeople are slowly boiling–and not noticing.
 

Selling Through A Slump

/1 Comment/in /by

Over the past few weeks, I have worked with the good people at TheCustomerCollective to co-produce an ebook on selling in rough economic times. 

Eleven top sales bloggers, from distinct veritical industry groups, with Top Ten lists from each: if you can’t find a few great ideas in this compendium, you’re either hopeless or should be master-teaching the class.

Enjoy.  It’s solid material, at a price hard to beat (free).  Let me know what you think.

-Charlie

Selling Through A Slump: An Industry-by-Industry Playbook

A Guide by Salespeople for Salespeople on How to Sell Your Way to Recovery

Download this Free ebook

Selling in a recession is tough. And simply doing more of the same is not the way to survive, much less thrive, in a recession. There are important dos and don’ts in times like these. This ebook is your industry-specific roadmap out of the economic slump.

Selling through a Slump: An Industry-by-Industry Playbook brings together sales strategies and best practices from 11 top sales experts from 11 distinct vertical market sectors, ranging from retail to health care to telecom—because one size doesn’t always fit all. The practical tips and experience-based wisdom here aren’t just limited to any single industry, though. Regardless of your market sector, you’re bound to find value in this arsenal of great sales ideas.

Get access to exclusive tips on how to sell in a recessionary market, from renowned sales experts like Jill Konrath, Charles Green, and Dave Stein. We know you’ve got questions—we wrote this ebook to give you answers.

Click here for valuable sales strategies from experts in every industry:

Charles Green, Founder and CEO,
Trusted Advisor Associates
Selling for Accountants and Consultants

Skip Anderson, Founder,
Selling to Consumers Sales Training
Selling for Retailers

Mike Kujawski, Founder,
Centre of Excellence for Public Sector Marketing
Selling to Public Sector Clients

Mike Wise, VP, Insurance Technologies,
IdeaStar Incorporated
Selling for Insurance Agents

Matt Homann, Founder,
LexThink LLC
Selling for Lawyers

Anneke Seley, Founder and CEO,
PhoneWorks LLC
Selling in Health Care

John Caddell,
Caddell Insight Group
Selling in Telecommunications Markets

Dave Stein, Founder and CEO,
ES Research Group, Inc
Selling Technology

Jill Konrath, Author,
Selling to Big Companies
Selling in Services

Anne Miller, Founder,
Chiron Associates
Selling Media

Dave Brock, President and CEO,
Partners in EXCELLENCE
Selling to Manufacturers

  

Click Here to Download

(A simple registration is required)

Brought to you by The Customer Collective and Oracle CRM.
Welcome to the conversation.

Giving Away Green and More

/2 Comments/in /by

In bad economic times, sellers need to pay attention to what’s important.

Their knives are dull from slashing costs. But you can’t cut your way to profits. Now is the time to hug your best customers and nurture relationships with prospects.

However, in-person meetings with sellers keep dwindling.

How can sellers make an impact with a less available audience?

How do you create value even when you’re not in front of your client?

One of the best ways is free sampling. Give something away for nothing. It feels counter-intuitive at a time of cost-cutting. And I don’t mean rebates or discounts, either. I mean free. Here’s why.

One of my clients, Perry OP, an office products and furniture dealer in Temple, Texas, “walks the talk” when it comes to their core values of service, integrity and community. Earlier this year, they gave away a $25,000 Office Makeover that garnered local radio and TV attention.

At the same time—much more quietly–they delivered a check to a battered women’s shelter. The shelter was selected by Perry employees, who volunteered to contribute through payroll deductions. This they did behind the scenes, without fanfare. They just showed up with a check and blessed the shelter.

Perry’s current initiative is free “green”. Their “Bright Ideas for Going Green This Spring” campaign unashamedly occupies half the real estate on their homepage. Perry’s genuine customer focus demonstrates to prospects and customers alike that they are less interested in selling you something than developing a relationship with you. Their customer and lead nurturing program is sure to build trust between the Perry team and prospects/customers. Their “free samples” are real, fun and unique, for example:

• Bringing emphasis and awareness on Green “days” to calendar (St. Patrick’s Day, Earth Day, first day of Spring)
• Win a free HP tote bag by taking a green quiz
• Offering “green” product alternatives
• A Blogpost : “5 Easy Ways to Add Some Green to Your Office”

What did it cost Perry to give all this away? My guess is HP will donate the branded tote bags and everything else is just time invested in electronic info in various forms.

How big a deal is this? Very. It’s easy for days to become weeks, then months, between contacts. According to a recent CSO Insights study, 80% of sellers fail to follow up after the initial contact.

Since relationships are what differentiate sellers, out-of-sight easily translates to a decrease in buyer loyalty. Therefore, nurturing relationships electronically is a great way to stay in touch between visits.

What can you do to provide free sampling to your clients?

Here’s my top 5 list:

1. Blog (500-800 words) on something of interest to your audience, yet not self-promoting.

2. Publish an electronic newsletter. For about $15 per month, Constant Contact or iContact offer a user-friendly way to develop and track email marketing efforts with your audience.

3. Offer a free one-hour “strategy session” with a prospect. This is a great way for them to “free sample” you—the idea behind Selling by Doing, not Selling by Telling.

4. Send them out a timely email with topical information. Industry trends, regulation news, competitor updates, your new offerings that will help them (note: careful not to self-promote)

5. Client Spotlight – you’re reading an example of a “client spotlight” that features something unique from one of my clients. Why not show some love to your clients by sharing the things they care about that others can potentially learn from?

We’re really just scratching the surface of ways sellers can create value for buyers.

Why Value Propositions are Overrated

/9 Comments/in /by

Freud famously wondered, ‘what do women want?’

B2B sales people wonder, ‘what do buyers want?’ Unlike Freud, however, they think they know the answer.

The received wisdom is, of course, that buyers want “a compelling value proposition.” As John Caddell puts it in “Another kind of value proposition”

The term “value proposition” has been in vogue in business-to-business sales for twenty years or more. In short, it means that a product for sale must, in essence, create more money (in increased revenue or reduced costs) that it costs to purchase. “If you buy my widget for $x, you’ll get $5x back over the next 10 years,” or something like that.

…The value proposition is a very logical concept. That is its beauty and its limitation.

Just one problem, as Caddell points out: it’s demonstrably not true.

Or, to be more precise, it explains far less about buying behavior than most B2B sellers like to believe. So—truth notwithstanding, the economic form of a “value proposition” remains front and center in B2B sales.

Jeffrey Gitomer puts it nicely: “People buy with their heart—then justify it with their brain.”

The late Bill Brooks, with Tom Travesano, neatly summarized a brilliant survey of several thousand buyers thusly: “People prefer to buy what they need from people who understand what it is that they want.” Not much said there about value propositions.

What “value proposition” doesn’t usually convey is precisely this sense of emotional connection. Caddell notices this too in his recent “customer anthropologizing:”

I haven’t heard one customer say, “I would recommend Company Y because we were able to increase our inventory turns and thereby reduce working capital requirements.”

Instead, they say things like, “I really like that they are easy to reach and work hard to solve my problems when I have them.” Or: “They could have nickeled-and-dimed me when I had to make some changes during implementation, but they didn’t do that.”

In other words, what sticks with customers, and makes them recommenders, are things like “reliability,” “caring about my business,” “saving me time,” “making me smarter.” In other words, the deeper, emotional, fuzzy stuff.

Exactly.

Yet, there’s even more. Sellers can be persuaded they need to be more emotional. But then they confront a next-level problem.

They think being friendly is the opposite of making money, and turn a simple concept into an unnecessary, fake ethical dilemma. They say either:

1. I can’t get too close to them—I have to make the sale, or
2. If I get the sale by being close to them, then I’ve conned them.

Such unnecessary angst.

It seems we may need Freud after all.

Stay tuned for the next installment in the story of Value Propositions gone astray.

Does Closing Kill Sales?

/4 Comments/in /by

Jill Konrath has a great little podcast titled Closing Can Kill Sales, at salesopedia.com.  

Right there, you may be tempted to say, ‘oh come on, that’s old hat.  Nobody does that anymore; it’s totally schlocky and manipulative and in (B2B, consulting, telecom—pick your choice) no one does that anymore.’

Well, just last week I came across a sophisticated B2B software/communications company, and guess what they wanted to know: how to close more sales.

They may not be thinking old-school “assumptive closes, constant closing,” or “you want more fries with that?”  But they are still focused, as a critical operational goal, on how to “close more sales.”  Plus ça change…

Jill is refreshingly direct.  Pure Midwest, corn-fed charm, you betcha; and she’s the real deal in person.  She came up the classic way, selling Xerox copiers.  She cut her teeth on the “ABC” rule—Always Be Closing.  But, like Huck Finn, she always felt badly about not being able to do it.

About closing, she is direct: “I hate it.  It always felt like a violation of the way people normally behave.  It’s about manipulative strategies to get people to say yes, and I just hated it.”

She sold a lot of copiers, though.  “One thing Xerox did teach us was to ask a lot of questions, and I was good at that.  I was really trying to find out the business case, and I didn’t know if it was there or not.  So I kept asking so I could find out, for myself.”

What does Jill say to people about closing?  “I say to them, never close; never be closing.  But always advance the sales process.  They need to know the next step, whatever it is, that’s true.  And eventually, you’ll hear a magic word—they start to say ‘we.’ Then, after a while, it’s ‘how do we buy this?”

There are others—Phil McGee is one, I hope we hear from him—who I think might say that’s exactly what ‘closing’ is supposed to mean—not manipulation, just relentlessly exploring questions. 

But Jill is no dummy either, and she’s quite insistent about ‘never close.’  Why the passion?

I think it’s because the word ‘closing’ is encrusted with nearly a century of subtext of control and manipulation.  It is too baked in for the niceties of alternate definitions to have an effect.

Take my B2B software example.  They don’t want old-school scripted trick lines; they think they’re too sophisticated for that.  But they’re kidding themselves.  Just as much as an old door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, they’re looking for a way to get a customer to do what they want them to do—namely buy their product.  They just want it done in a hip, 2009, Sales 2.0, CRM, modern kind of way.

Control and manipulation by any other name is still the same.

The real meaning of Jill’s dictum is deeper, I think.  It means, stop, stop stop trying to force your will on others.  Allow yourself to believe that if you really treat customers well and help them to make the best decision, you’ll get your fair share of that opportunity—and way, way more than that in the opportunities that follow.

For most of us, closing does kill sales.  Paradoxically the best way to sell is to Stop Trying to Sell, and Stop Trying to Close.  Just help your customer.     

Sacred Cows, or Goals Gone Wild

/9 Comments/in /by

Personally, I love seeing sacred cows sacrificed. Maybe it’s that contrarian thinking helps learning. Maybe skepticism came with studying philosophy and doing strategy consulting.

Maybe I’m just a little bent. Whatever.

Let’s take goal-setting. That’s about as big a sacred cow as you get in business. Googling “goal setting” gets you 5.6 million hits.

Jack Welch praises it. Scottie Hamilton and Michael Phelps get cited as examples of it. Martial artists swear by it. Management by objectives is built around it.

I’m not sure there’s any more common theme in self-help and business success books. It’s just so, like, obvious. Goal-setting may be the secret behind the success of Motherhood and Apple Pie. I’m pretty sure it explains the Boy Scouts.

So–what an unexpected delight to find a balloon-pricking, mellow-harshing, skeptical piece of inquiry in, of all places, Harvard Business School.  (Actually, it’s in the HBS Working Knowledge series, which does a fine job of exploring quirky ideas. They’re just not usually so big as this one).  A little bonus: the smirky title, "Goals Gone Wild: the Systematic Side Effects of Over-prescribing Goals Setting."

The paper is summarized here and co-author Max Bazerman is interviewed here:

From the executive summary:

• The harmful side effects of goal setting are far more serious and systematic than prior work has acknowledged.

• Goal setting harms organizations in systematic and predictable ways.

• The use of goal setting can degrade employee performance, shift focus away from important but non-specified goals, harm interpersonal relationships, corrode organizational culture, and motivate risky and unethical behaviors.

• In many situations, the damaging effects of goal setting outweigh its benefits.

But surely, you say, this is a case of excess, of bad apples. Goals are not the problem, people who use goals badly are the problem. (You remember–guns don’t kill people, people kill people).

No, says Bazerman. When the adoption of goals so predictably and systematically produces negative results, it is fair to say it is goals themselves that are the problem. (Are you listening, NRA?)

Well, you might say, if goal-setting is so dangerous, how’d we get to use it so much and so deeply?

Says Bazerman:

It is easy to implement. It is easy to measure. It is easy to document successes. And in laboratory experiments, it has been shown to be extremely successful at improving the measured behavior. [we] simply argue that goals have gone wild in terms of their impact on other unmeasured outcomes. When we factor in the consistent findings that stretch and specific goals both narrow focus on a limited set of behaviors while increasing risk-taking and unethical behavior, their simple implementation can become a vice.

Bazerman and his co-authors are not saying goal-setting is bad per se; they’re not raving nut-jobs. They’re just asking a question that doesn’t get asked nearly often enough.

They have taken a sober, holistic look at one of the most pervasive, unchallenged, unexamined mantras of business—and brought some welcome fresh air to the issue.

Bravo.

How Not to Sell a Window

/7 Comments/in /by

We need to replace our picture window, so I’m told.

My wife, Thelma, is an Architectural Designer. Whatever she says goes when it comes to house repairs and needs. My opinion, while sometimes solicited so I don’t feel left out, isn’t really relevant, and that’s fine with me. So, when my wife started getting quotes, I didn’t even answer the phone.

On one call, I couldn’t help overhearing one side of the conversation, and wish I’d heard what the window guy said exactly. It went something like this:

Window Guy: I understand you’re looking for new windows from the form you filled out at the Home Show last week.

Thelma: Actually only one, in our dining area.

Window Guy: Well we’d like to come out and quote it for you.

Thelma: Ok – when? We want to do it soon.

Window Guy: We’d need to find a time when your husband will be there too.

Thelma (not missing how that sounded): I actually make the decisions on this. I do architectural design, and do this a lot. We don’t need him there.

Window Guy: It’s our policy to have both homeowners present. We can’t do it without him too.

Thelma (with a raised brow and just a hint of sarcasm) : Ok – thank you. I guess we won’t use your windows then.

Who would have thought Window Guy or his script would provide a teaching moment? What Trust Principles were ignored, and what was the result?

From the book Trust-Based Selling, the four principles that drive Trust-based Selling are:

1. A focus on the customer for the customer’s sake, not just the
seller’s sake.

Let’s see. Window Guy has the person on the phone who requested the quote, who’s experienced in the field, and who has clearly identified herself as both the technical and the economic buyer. His script–if that’s what it was–focused on whose needs?

2. A style of selling that is consistently collaborative.

Thelma was pretty clear that she was ready to collaborate. So the customer collaborates, but Window Guy can’t get out of his own way and off his own agenda.

3. A perspective centered on the medium to long term.

She’s an Architectural Designer, and probably helps clients decide about windows. I bet if she were a happy customer if she’d be a great referral source–for Window Guy! But on the other hand, if she’s unhappy, would she ever refer Window Guy? Or would she perhaps even suggest others if the name came up?

4. A habit of being transparent in all your dealings with the customer.

Thelma was transparent. She said exactly why I didn’t need to be there. Window Guy? He never shared why it was relevant for me to be present. Maybe they have experience with customers that evidenced a need to answer both homeowners questions at the same time. But he didn’t share that, or any other reason, and even if there was a reason, it should have been one that complied with Trust Principle #1 above. But he never got there, because he wasn’t listening, or there was no place in his script to allow for a dialog.

The result? First, Window Guy didn’t get to bid because I won’t be there. Second, we don’t have to deal with that company.

Maybe in Window Guy’s world that’s a win-win. Not in mine.

62 Sales Tips for a Recession – Based on Trust

/2 Comments/in /by

 We’ve been exploring a 5-part series on How Trust Principles Can Recession-Proof your Business Development:

  1. The Trust Perspective
  2. The First Trust Principle: Client Focus
  3. The Second Trust Principle: Collaboration
  4. The Third Trust Principle: The Long Term View
  5. The Fourth Trust Principle: Transparency

Today we have have aggregated all 62 Specific Sales Tips in one post for your convenience. You can also download 62 Specific Sales Tips as a pdf for easy reading and forwarding to friend.

Organized by the Four Trust Principles (Client focus, Collaboration, Long Term, and Transparency), here we go—from 1 to 62.

 

How to Succeed in a Recession with Client Focus

 

1. You’re a staff strategist or a line marketer. You have one mandate: Focus. Downplay new lead generation—recessions are time to dance with the one who brung you. Good strategists know saying yes to one means saying "no" to others. Resist the temptation to go RFP-hunting. Let your #1 customers know who loves them, and show it.

2. You’re a financial planner. You fear client phone calls in a recession—they mean withdrawals. Do the opposite—call your clients. Give them life advice, like "next year is not the time to retire after all." In times of fear, those who reach out to hear the pain are those who gain later.

3. You’re an accounting firm. It’s tax season. Everyone thinks you’re busy. Surprise them with something free:  a 2-3 hour clinic for your clients’ kids who are now college graduates on how to do their own taxes.

4. You’re a CPA firm. Offer to "spotlight" your client’s human interest / charity / goodwill story on your firm’s blog or newsletter.

5. You’re a restaurant owner. You know who your good customers are. Surprise them next visit and pick up the tab. Quietly. After the meal.

6. You sell insurance but don’t track your clients’ payment status because you already got the commission. Start tracking them now. In a recession no one wants unintentionally lapsed LTD or long term care policies.

7. You’re majority owner of a private company. Take off your shareholder hat and put on your investment hat. This is when you grow share by growing trust. Draw down on the shareholder account to invest in the employee, customer and supplier relationship accounts.

8. You provide tech support to home businesses. That green stuff about lowering electrical costs is a lot more interesting to customers than it was 6 months ago: bone up on it.

9. You’re a doctor, and recessions mean more scrambling for less insurance money. When you have good test results for a nervous patient, don’t wait for the next visit. Call and celebrate with the patient for a few minutes.

10. You’re a one-person consulting shop. Recessions drive changes in customer needs. Can your firm change on a dime to meet new client needs? Of course you can, you’re a one-person firm. Figure out what those new needs are, then go talk to the client.

11. You’re in corporate sales and your funnel has slowed to a crawl. Do your research, then offer your prospect three ideas that can reduce costs in the next quarter without any extra work.

12. You’re anyone. In a recession, customers are more worried and self-focused than usual. Go take that course on listening and empathy you’ve been putting off.  It’s twice as important now, and you’ve no longer got the excuse of being too busy.

13. You’re a practice area head in a professional services firm; project or client relationship managers report to you. When was the last time you visited the top 3-4 clients? Go visit, with your client manager. Your agenda? "Just wanted to hear what’s new with you. Besides our own services, what can we do for you?" And don’t even think about charging the time.

14. Your customers are in retail (or chemicals, or telecom—whatever). Ask yourself what’s changed, new, and critical to them because of the recession. Now ask what you can do to help. ("Increase sales" and "cut price" don’t count). Then redesign your offerings.

(Example: For us, professional services firms are big clients. They are cutting back discretionary travel and training. The "obvious" answer is webinars. But as one client says, "There’s only so much webinar you can take stuck in your cubicle from 9 to 5. We’re being webinar-ed to death." Our solution? The Onsite Offsite(TM). The best of offsites, minus the costs, but without the compromises of conventional one-way datapipe solutions).

15. You’re a consulting firm. Don’t succumb to the "hey, we’ve all got to pitch in here, can’t you lower your rate for us" argument. Pitch in, yes. Make strategic investments, yes. Re-tool your offerings, yes. But don’t lower your rates. It just says you had "padding" before. And an insolvent consultant is no help to clients.

16. You’re a law firm.  Offer a series of brown-bag talks given by partners on recession-relevant topics. Invite your existing clients.

17. You’re a development director for a charitable organization. Your donors are your customers. Instead of asking them for money, turn the tables: ask how a particular donor is affected by the recession. How can you add value to his or her life? With whom can you put them in touch?

18. You’re a systems firm. Your tech leaders need speaking training. Invite three clients to join so they can learn too.

19. After a long day at the office a longtime client contact calls to tell you he’s been laid off. You have to leave, but offer to speak later that night, to help out in any way you can.

20. Some of your customers sell to other customers of yours. Make introductions, then make more.

21. You’re an accounting firm. Hold topical lunchtime 60-minute phone calls for five of your medium-sized clients’ treasurers on recession-relevant topics. You run the logistics and line up the topics. And don’t wait until after tax season, they’re hurting now.

22. Just to practice Principle 1 Client Focus, go drop dimes in someone’s parking meter, or pay the toll for the guy behind you. It’s cheap behavioral training for client focus. And it makes two people feel good.

How to Succeed in a Recession with Collaboration

23. If you’re a consultant of any type, write your next proposal seated next to your client. Bring all your backup records, rent a conference room, and collaboratively proceed to write a joint proposal. Rather than deal with issues after the proposal has been written and sent and it shows up as a disagreement in the final sales meeting—raise it in joint meeting.

24. If you’re a speaker or trainer, put together a speaking tour, or a combined webinar, of like-minded people—including those you used to think of as competitors.

25. Does your company outsource key processes? Is the recession causing strains in the relationship? Have an offsite meeting with key leaders of each firm, with the agenda of "where can we collaborate more, and argue with each other less?"

26. Answer the question the customer asked you, not the one you wanted to answer. The customer is not your competitor—collaborate with the customer by talking straight.

27. If you’re a B2B manufacturing salesperson, call a key customer. Suggest the two firms sit down together offsite for a day and discuss "what could we do better together to make things cheaper, faster, or more profitable for both of us?" Be prepared to share your manufacturing process, costs, and profit margins, so you can figure it out together.

28. If you’re a professional services provider, sit down with your client and see which portion of your services could be performed more cost effectively by the client, or how your costs could be reduced. For example, if preliminary research needs to be done, ask if the client has someone who could do it, and get approval to rely on it, or use it as a base. If you charge for materials, let the client make the copies and produce the the books. When you travel for the client offer to use the client’s travel service if the client can get a better price on travel.

29. If you’re professional services firm with underemployed staff, offer to swap similarly underemployed staff with a client. Both will gain valuable perspective and experience without being taken off critical work. The employees involved will feel grateful and challenged. And the linkages between the firms will be strengthened. None of which would easily happen in good economic times.

30. If you’re in a business where sales are large and take time, then at the next sales presentation meeting, have a client individual co-present with you. And make a point of it, saying "working collaboratively with you is what we believe in, and it’s even more important in tough times like these." Actions speak louder than words.

31. If you’re in a functional department of a large company (HR, Legal, IT), identify 3-4 of the same departments in other large companies in your geographic area. Create a collaborative work group across the companies that meets (within bounds of legal agendas) to share best practices and work opportunities.

32. Give your receivables clerk a budget to buy flowers or chocolates for the payables clerk at your most important customers for Valentine’s day (you’ve still got a few days).

33. If you’re in sales or customer relationship management, go find who, if anyone, is handling innovation for your firm. Ask them if they would like to collaborate on that innovation work with Customer A, Customer B and Customer C?

34. Ditto in reverse. Ask your key customer whether anyone is handling innovation in their firm—and if they would appreciate the chance to work with your innovation people.

35. Look over your professional services providers. Is there anyone with whom you can work a barter arrangement? (Remember to check with your accountant on the tax issues, even if you don’t want to be appointed by the President).

36. If you’re in sales, go talk to your customers’ salespeople. Share best practices and success stories; also share horror stories about how each organization treats salespeople from other companies (including how theirs treat you). You will gain perspective and insight about your customer’s company, and they may even put in a good word for you with their company’s buyers.

How to Succeed in a Recession with a Long Term View

37. Buy two tickets now for a major cultural or athletic event scheduled for mid to late 2010. Send one to a highly favored customer or client, with a note saying "We will get through all this, together, and I look forward to celebrating with you once we do. Keep this ticket in a safe place, because mine is the seat next to yours."

38. Pick your top 3 clients, and strategize internally on how you can strengthen your relationships for the long run. Then go discuss those plans with those three clients, telling them exactly what you’ve done, and why.

39. Help everyone you know who has been laid off–provide advice, contacts, and/or just listen. These are people who are potentially great customers down the road, but don’t do it for that reason, do it because you care.

40. If you’re a consulting organization, now is a great time to establish your alumni network. And if you already have one, kick up the level of involvement. Host cocktail parties in various locations. Establish or update the directory. Get your alumni an intranet page, or a devoted Facebook group or other aggregation. Facilitate their networking.

41. If you’re a lawyer or consultant and not using social media to connect with your clients, now is the time for this type of investment–build your network and help your clients build theirs.

42. If you are one of the many unfortunate individuals who has lost a job, don’t burn bridges in anger, hurt or frustration. You’re now selling you. Keep the long term in mind. Join the alumni network—or offer to help create one. Use social media. Begin networking ASAP. Leaders don’t like causing hardship—they prefer to help. How you act in the days after a layoff advertises your trustworthiness.

43. If a key customer is in the middle of an important job with you and they can’t afford for you to finish it, talk it over with them and offer to defer payment until such time as the customer can pay. That could be a long time. But if the relationship is good, this generous offer creates trust and greatly reduces the risk of nonpayment. And the cost of financing these days is very low. It doesn’t cost much to be generous, it lowers credit risk by creating trust and reciprocity, and showing a little faith and courage does wonders for the relationship.

44. Consider what you can offer your clients’ children. Seriously. A financial planner in Canada offered free investment planning education to a client’s 12 and 14 year old children. His co-workers chided him because there were no fees associated with it. His response was, "Are you kidding? Their father loves me for it; that’s good for referrals. And someday his kids will inherit a lot of his wealth. I’m in this business for the long haul—my lifetime and the lifetimes of my clients."

45. If you offer a client a special "one off" deal, be clear about why you’re doing it. For any deal you craft now, imagine doing the same deal 100 times under similar circumstances. Would you? Would your client? If you didn’t answer "yes" to both, go back to the drawing board. Don’t worry about what you’re going to "get" in the near-term, or even from whom. It all works out in the end when we’re willing to do what’s right. And the end is what matters when we’re living this principle.

46. If you’re a leader, be prepared to lead in a most personal way. The month after 9/11, Koh Boon Hwee, then-chairman of Singapore Air, described the US airline industry’s reaction to the drop in travel: "They laid off huge numbers of employees." By contrast, at Singapore Air, Koh took a massive pay cut, his direct reports took sizable hits, and everyone took a significant but smaller pay cut. He laid off no one. It’s no wonder that travelers, employees and shareholders alike are loyal to such companies. They live the trust principle of long-term focus, and are richly rewarded for it.

How to Succeed in a Recession with Transparency

47. Once you develop your plans for addressing the recession, share your information and concerns with key customers, including how your plans could affect the relationship. This can create an intense, positive discussion.

48. If you have layoffs that affect customers, let them know immediately, together with succession plans for customer contacts. And don’t try to shut off customers from dialogue with their former contacts in your firm; give closure room to work. If you’re afraid of what the employee will say, then you have bigger problems to work on—trying to hide it will only make it worse.

49. If you come up with an approach to the economy that could help other companies—yes, even competitors—share it publicly. Be the company that cares enough about people to share the innovative ideas that could help pull us all out, or reduce the pain that individuals will bear.

50. Share your cost structure with your customers. This will eliminate any suspicions they have about your pricing. They will also appreciate your candor and come to trust you more.

51. Don’t BS your customers about where your own company stands—financially and otherwise—because you’re afraid of looking bad or making your clients/partners worry. Tell it like it is. They can handle the truth. Leave spin control to the ordinary companies out there. When fear rules the land, truth-telling serves as an anchor to those who don’t know what to think.

52. Share personal information about your staff with potential clients. Pictures and bios make it far easier for customers to know who they’ll be working with, or who they’ll be speaking with on the phone. Human to human. It makes it all personal. If you’re holding back because search firms might poach good people, remember—in a recession there’s not a lot of hiring going on. Right now, making customers feel safer is more important than holding rare hiring raids at bay.

53. In sales conversations, compare your product or service to others. Include all relevant information—the good, the bad, and the ugly—to help your customers make informed choices. Do not even think of spinning it—you cannot spin and be transparent at the same time. Realize that some buyers will go with your competitors as a result of what you’ve shared. Deal with it. You’ll end up with more and better in the end.

54. During your next client visit, ask yourself:  is there an elephant in the room? A hidden objection, a pricing concern, a weakness, a broken promise? Take the risk, do the counter-intuitive thing and say something like, "Hey, I might be way off-base about this, but if I were in your shoes, I might be wondering … Is that an issue/concern for you?" You have to unlearn some old bad habits to be transparent. But there are few faster ways to build trust.

55. Now is the time to ask for feedback from your clients. Honest feedback. Really honest feedback. Now is also the time to offer feedback for your clients. Honest feedback. Really honest feedback.

56. Tell the truth about your own emotional reality. If you’re stressed/worried/anxious … saying so will build intimacy. We’re not advocating a public panic attack; we all have to manage our emotions well during tough times. But to an extent we’re all in a similar boat right now and being real about it has its own rewards. Not the least of which is you are far more likely to get the straight scoop from your client about his/her reality, which puts you in a much better position to be of service.

57. Consider sharing information about your backlog, prospective orders, or plans as they affect vendors and suppliers. In a recession, having advance, non-binding discussions about the future is invaluable to those who sell to you. Help them and they will help you. Clam up and refuse to discuss, and you just frustrate them. We normally avoid this kind of disclosure out of fear for losing some competitive edge. That fear is vastly over-stated, and more than compensated for by the supplier loyalty you engender by being willing to open with those who serve you.

58. Your company wants to purchase a complex piece of equipment, but it’s too expensive. Your vendor wants to sell it to you, but doesn’t know how to make it less costly based on your specs. If you are both transparent—why you need it, what it’s worth to you, what it costs them, and how they make it—then together you can find a way to make it cheaper. That’s collaboration—but what enables collaboration is transparency.

59. Share information about your product development plans. Amazon just got slammed on their own blogs for giving their customers no advance warning and no price break for the new Kindle. Amazon will do just fine, thank you, but who needs the bad publicity? Yes, that’s the industry norm in electronics—but that hardly makes it right to tick off your existing customers in a recessionary time.

60. When your client asks you a question such as, "Do you have experience in…?"—answer honestly and completely. If you aren’t right for a project, it’s ok. Put your scarcity mentality, which drives your fear of losing the sale, on the back burner. It’s better to address that up front, then for your client to find out later. You should always do this, but in recession-based times of fear and suspicion, the power of transparency in service to the customer is magnified.

61. It’s a naked world—you really can’t hide anything anymore thanks to emails, meetings at Starbucks, cell phone records. You may be practicing transparency unintentionally. But "oops" moments make you look deceitful, especially in sales. So, don’t do that. Don’t say or write anything you wouldn’t mind everyone reading in the newspaper. Honesty and lack of spin in sales in suspicious downtimes is so refreshingly counter-intuitive that your sales will increase.

62. Share your product development plans with your customers before the products are ready for prime time. The software industry long ago figured out that the benefits of letting customers develop their beta releases vastly outweighed the competitive advantage accruing to a customer. People are more likely to buy what they’ve had a hand in developing—if you give them the chance. If you’re in professional services, sharing the early version of a new service offering with potential clients will give you invaluable insight, help educate your buyers, and increases trust. More importantly, your willingness to share your imperfections "early and ugly" says a lot about who you are.

Don’t forget, you can also download 62 Specific Sales Tips as a pdf for easy reading and forwarding to friend.  And, in a spirit of collaboration, we sincerely hope you will feel moved to jump in and share your own comments and ideas.

Day 5 of 5: Trust-based Business Development in a Recession: Principle 4, Transparency

/2 Comments/in /by

This is Day 5 of 5 in our week-long series of selling in a recession using the Four Trust Principles. Today’s principle is Principle 4—make transparency your first instinct, except when being transparent is illegal or hurtful to others.

Transparency helps business development in a recession in three ways.

First, it gives information to your customers, suppliers and partners so they can generate new ideas about how to work with you—to cut costs, create new service offerings, or alter their own practices to align with your products or services.

Second, emotional transparency enables empathy—always important to selling, but especially now. Empathy deepens personal relationships, which build better business relationships. And relationships formed under times of stress are the strongest.

Finally, transparency is the antidote to suspicion. In a recession, bad behavior goes up. Buyers are more suspicious of sellers’ motives. Transparency eases their mind about the motives behind your actions, your words, and your intentions. Transparency helps your sales.

As you read through today’s suggestions list, you’ll probably notice that the main reason we don’t practice transparency is fear—fear of being taken advantage of by competitors, by employees, and by customers. Now is the time to remember the adage “the best way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.” You receive the behavior you expect.

Try trusting your customers by being transparent.

Here are 16 ideas for improving sales in a recession by being transparent. Please add your own—on this post, and on all five of the days’ posts.

1. Once you develop your plans for addressing the recession, share your information and concerns with key customers, including how your plans could affect the relationship. This can create an intense, positive discussion.

2. If you have layoffs that affect customers, let them know immediately, together with succession plans for customer contacts. And don’t try to shut off customers from dialogue with their former contacts in your firm; give closure room to work. If you’re afraid of what the employee will say, then you have bigger problems to work on—trying to hide it will only make it worse.

3. If you come up with an approach to the economy that could help other companies—yes, even competitors—share it publicly. Be the company that cares enough about people to share the innovative ideas that could help pull us all out, or reduce the pain that individuals will bear.

4. Share your cost structure with your customers. This will eliminate any suspicions they have about your pricing. They will also appreciate your candor, and come to trust you more.

5. Don’t BS your customers about where your own company stands—financially and otherwise—because you’re afraid of looking bad or making your clients/partners worry. Tell it like it is. They can handle the truth. Leave spin control to the ordinary companies out there. When fear rules the land, truth-telling serves as an anchor to those who don’t know what to think.

6. Share personal information about your staff with potential clients. Pictures and bios make it far easier for customers to know who they’ll be working with, or who they’ll be speaking with on the phone. Human to human. It makes it all personal. If you’re holding back because search firms might poach good people, remember—in a recession there’s not a lot of hiring going on. Right now, making customers feel safer is more important than holding rare hiring raids at bay.

7. In sales conversations, compare your product or service to others. Include all relevant information—the good, the bad, and the ugly—to help your customers make informed choices. Do not even think of spinning it—you cannot spin and be transparent at the same time. Realize that some buyers will go with your competitors as a result of what you’ve shared. Deal with it. You’ll end up with more and better in the end.

8. During your next client visit, ask yourself, is there an elephant in the room? A hidden objection, a pricing concern, a weakness, a broken promise? Take the risk; do the counter-intuitive thing and say something like, “Hey, I might be way off-base about this, but if I were in your shoes, I might be wondering … Is that an issue/concern for you?” You have to unlearn some old bad habits to be transparent. But there are few faster ways to build trust.

9. Now is the time to ask for feedback from your clients. Honest feedback. Really honest feedback. Now is also the time to offer feedback for your clients. Honest feedback. Really honest feedback.

10. Tell the truth about your own emotional reality. If you’re stressed/worried/anxious … saying so will build intimacy. We’re not advocating a public panic attack; we all have to manage our emotions well during tough times. But to an extent we’re all in a similar boat right now and being real about it has its own rewards. Not the least of which is you are far more likely to get the straight scoop from your client about his/her reality, which puts you in a much better position to be of service.

11. Consider sharing information about your backlog, prospective orders, or plans as they affect vendors and suppliers. In a recession, having advance, non-binding discussions about the future is invaluable to those who sell to you. Help them, and they will help you. Clam up and refuse to discuss, and you just frustrate them. We normally avoid this kind of disclosure out of fear for losing some competitive edge. That fear is vastly over-stated, and more than compensated for by the supplier loyalty you engender by being willing to open with those who serve you.

12. Your company wants to purchase a complex piece of equipment, but it’s too expensive. Your vendor wants to sell it to you, but doesn’t know how to make it less costly based on your specs. If you are both transparent—why you need it, what it’s worth to you, what it costs them, and how they make it—then together you can find a way to make it cheaper. That’s collaboration—but what enables collaboration is transparency.

13. Share information about your product development plans. Amazon just got slammed on their own blogs for giving their customers no advance warning and no price break for the new Kindle. Amazon will do just fine, thank you, but who needs the bad publicity? Yes, that’s the industry norm in electronics—but that hardly makes it right to tick off your existing customers in a recessionary time.

14. When your client asks you a question such as, “Do you have experience in…?”, answer honestly and completely. If you aren’t right for a project, it’s ok. Put your scarcity mentality—which drives your fear of losing the sale—on the back burner. It’s better to address that up front, then for your client to find out later. You should always do this; but in recession-based times of fear and suspicion, the power of transparency in service to the customer is magnified.

15. It’s a naked world— can’t really hide anything anymore thanks to emails, meetings at Starbucks, cell phone records. You may be practicing transparency unintentionally. But “oops” moments make you look deceitful, especially in sales. So, don’t do that. Don’t say or write anything you wouldn’t mind everyone reading in the newspaper. Honesty and lack of spin in sales in suspicious downtimes is so refreshingly counter-intuitive that your sales will increase.

16. Shareyour product development plans with your customers before the products are ready for prime time. The software industry long ago figured out that the benefits of letting customers develop their beta releases vastly outweighed the competitive advantage accruing to a customer. People are more likely to buy what they’ve had a hand in developing—if you give them the chance. If you’re in professional services, sharing the early version of a new service offering with potential clients will give you invaluable insight, help educate your buyers, and increases trust. More importantly, your willingness to share your imperfections "early and ugly" says a lot about who you are.

 

That’s the end of this weeklong series of using trust to improve selling in a recession. Link back to the beginning of the series here. And feel free to add your own ideas throughout.