Experience the Challenger Sales Model in UAE with airSlate SignNow

How to create outlook signature

back in 2005 when the air bus was first blown I was running that company called hummingbird and we did three of those four biggest deals and what I found in running a software company we were really trying to target large enterprise complex selling environments and what I found was that all of the salespeople that worked for me certainly understood that sales success is largely derived from having the right relationships with people and they also talked about strategy but when you quiz a salesperson about strategy they're kind of like a deer in the headlights I don't know about you but if a salesperson comes to me and says the deal strategic I need to talk to you about it that's code to me for we need to discount the hell out of this so we're not going to sell anything for 18 months but I want the organization to invest heavily in pursuing it that's usually what strategic means but they don't really know what a good strategy is most salespeople just know a direct head-to-head strategy where they're going to behave on the basis that we have best brand best technology best reputation best price best service best support and we can just Duke it out with a competition based on their superiority they don't understand that there's other strategies that you can employ strategies of changing the rules strategies containment different things you can do when you sell and what I was trying to coach and mentor salespeople into executing well the first thing I did was try to get them to use our tools well and you know Miller Heiman I'm a huge fan of that's basically how I met Michael eight years ago Miller Heiman tools are fantastic but just having a tool doesn't mean the person is going to use it well just having a tool doesn't mean that the information in the document is going to be able to deliver insight because often that information is inaccurate often you beat people up in doing account plans and using these tools and you assemble groups of people to have meetings and do peer reviews and yet when you turn your back things just return back to how they were in the tools gather dust so I believe in all methodologies whether it's Taz whether it's hath weights value selling whether it's Miller Harmons blue sheets Green sheets Gold sheets they're great the trick is to get somebody to use something wealth and the view that I formed is as the way a salesperson thinks and operates that determines their success not the tools they use and what I came up with was a framework for professional selling that actually solved this problem predominantly of strategy because you know strategies like a person standing at a golf hole you know they plan out what they're going to do but they can't actually hit the ball is the real problem so you've got to have something that's executable a strategy that's executable and last year I actually talked about this concept of you know we want salespeople to function in that top right-hand quadrants we use these terms of sort of hunters which have been the top left-hand quadrant and farmers or relationship managers on that bottom right-hand side transactional people more in the retail industry you know but what really defines being strategic and when I interview a salesperson and ask them I never got a good answer and to me being strategic absolutely first and foremost means as Jonathan was saying today and also Lou this concept of being a challenger being strategic to me means getting there first engaging early at very senior levels having conversations about business problems and then embedding yourself in a compelling business case in a way that creates disadvantage for the competition you need to wire into the requirements this document that will eventually come to market that the two of three are there to participate in will be wired against them because you got in early and set an agenda especially around value and the reason it's important to focus on value is because we all need to behave as if our biggest competitor is not a traditional competition our biggest competitor is do nothing we need to think what happens if the customer has other funding priorities if things change within their business how can I be absolutely confident that they will go ahead because as much as by as what there are a while it's expensive for them to go to market and buy things in big complex sales environments where there's nine months 18 months sell cycles it's very expensive for us to sell to them so what I came up with was this concept called RSVP selling not really a sales methodology but a framework for thinking about selling and some of the things we've heard today is that coaching is dying a sales managers don't have the bandwidth they're more administrators and spreadsheet jockeys these days more than anything else what we really need is the mentor people and get them thinking and acting the right way so what I do is every time I would sit down with a salesperson whether it was with their account plan with one of these sales tools or whether it was on the back of a napkin in a copy shop I would say to them tell me about the relationships that you've got in this account tell me about the relationships our competitors have got in this account and the reason I do that is because the cardinal sin of selling because relationships are foundational to any sales success the cardinal sin of selling is that people are often selling to the wrong person or the wrong level inside the organization they're selling to the people that can say no but not to the people who can say yes one of the problems we're trying to project value to somebody talking about all of your features and functions a features and functions can create price concerns because people think well that's probably over engineered for what I need well it's going to take a lot of effort in complexity to implement the other problem of features and functions is they don't win you deals they exclude you from deals because when you start focusing on features and functions you can often reveal something you don't have you can highlight weakness so it's a mistake and when you're selling at a lower level in the organization the people you're talking to want to talk about those things about your product when you go and sell at the right level when you have relationships with genuine power in an organization when you can challenge them you can talk about delivering business outcomes and managing risk their leader two things to focus on now you're going to get traction in the account and you're going to get sponsored down more about that later but I would say to them tell me about the relationships you have in this account and are they relationships they're going to cause us to win this piece of business are they relationships of integrity to the people of relationships do what they say they will do for you do they deliver you genuine insight and influence and give you Intel about what's going on that's the measure of relationships the next thing was strategy do you as the salesperson have a strategy for managing these relationships how are you going to avoid getting blocked are there external consultants that have got relationships that can influence in here for us so what's your strategy in managing relationships and what's your strategy for dealing with the competition number one competition is who do nothing we've got a strategy around business case value and that really leads into this concept of unique value not are you projecting a unique value proposition that's very old world that's what marketing departments in the 80s taught salespeople to do feature function advantage benefit keep projecting all of this value out there rather than predicting value do you know how we can uniquely create value for the customer with what it is that we offer and first and foremost by having a better understanding of their business and their operating environment than anybody else that's going to turn up and try to sell them so that was the third thing are we uniquely creating value and getting embedded in a business case so they go ahead they done stall and then the fourth thing that I concluded was very important was this thing of process alignment the reason most salespeople miss their forecast numbers is because they don't understand the buyers process they forecast-based often they've men on their own testosterone fueled needs to hit a number at the end of the financial year or the end of the quarter or they forecast based on when they think they're going to get a decision but they don't understand that after the decision there needs to be a legal department involved in a contract review it needs to go to a board there's all kinds of other processes often the lower down people in buying organizations if our salespeople engage at that level will inadvertently I won't say live at don't mislead our own salespeople because they themselves don't know all of the gates inside their own organization they may not know that the funding is not really secured they've only got the go-ahead to actually go and investigate so do we have strong process alignment are we aligned with the way that they evaluate and select and then we do we understand the approval and procurement process and I talked last year about this concept of closed plans because that's how you can get process alignment and you sit down with your by the senior person in the organization and you don't talk about the date that they're going to place an order on you that's transparently soft serving and it's not the end game anyway eh if you're a challenge of Sales Professional you're talking about the date that your customer is going to be live in production realizing the benefits of the solution you're delivering to solve their problem so what date do they have to be live by and then what happens if that dates missed there's someone very important not receive an annual bonus to someone lose their job if those things are in play I think now we can start to forecast with confidence because the customer is telling us why it's important to have this in place by date and once you've got that date we can start to go backwards to all of the events that feed into going live when do they need to assemble a project team one will I need to have contracts signed by and now what we've got is a date that you are going to get a purchase order based on the customers need not based on our need as a seller and we get accuracy so this concept of closed plans can be done very simply in a spreadsheet there's lots of simple tools for doing that so this concept of habitually saying to salespeople tell me about the relationships you've got what's your strategy how will we uniquely create value and show me you understand their evaluation selection and procurement process prove it all to me having that conversation over and over again regardless of which tool you use or no tool because this is very low overhead this is a conversational way to keep mentoring your people relentlessly so that they start to think that way I had the managing director of a company phoned me from Hong Kong very excited one day he read my book and three months later he was walking down the street after a coffee shop meeting with his number one rep in Asia and it had just dawned on him that he was using that process but he didn't realize he was doing it he uncovered some serious areas of vulnerability and person thought that they were home and hosed in the deal