In Hope is Not a Strategy, Rick Page argues that complex sales require a strategy that goes beyond a well-structured sales call to include efforts to influence the buying company, the individuals making the decision, and the process by which they will make the decision. Only through a keen awareness of all three of these elements can sellers maximize their odds of success and avoid wasting resources on hopeless causes.
Page’s approach includes techniques for influencing the factors the buyer will consider and for shaping each stage of the buying process by empowering and persuading the right individuals at the buying company.
Introduction
- Book incorporates insights from consultative, political, and team selling
- Focus is strategies for team selling to companies that will engage in competitive evaluations
Section 1: The Challenge – The Complex Sale
1. Out of Control
- The sales landscape is changing quickly
- Product commodification: Competitors quickly catch up to technology leaders
- Disintermediation: Middlemen are being cut out as buyers seek better value
- E-commerce: Internet is eliminating many salespeople and changing others
- Customer relationship management: CRM isn’t a solution, it needs to be paired with an intelligent process
- Business partnering: Teaming with other firms to provide a solution or teaming with the client to solve a problem
- Sales processes often end up out of control, with the salesperson having no idea what is going on
- It’s to the customer’s advantage to keep you in the dark. They want at least three vendors in every process because:
- Due diligence: shows they’ve explored the options
- Price leverage: let’s them play vendors off against each other
- Safety net: gives them somewhere to go if the preferred vendor falls through
- Lack of knowledge: they gain information from each sales process
- Lack of courage to tell you you’re losing
- Don’t get into the out of control situation in the first place; it’s very hard to fix it once you’re there
- You need a system that tells you if you’re winning early on and, if not, guides you to make strategic changes early enough to matter
2. What Makes Today’s Complex Sale Complex?
- Selling solutions vs. selling products. Selling solutions means that the vendor takes on responsibility for fixing an entire business process, not just helping with one issue.
- Competitive selling. You need to differentiate or control the issues or you will lose.
- Long sales cycles
- Services vs. products
- Executives will be involved earlier in the process if you’re selling a strategic solution
- Executives buy differently than technical team members
- Account management and repetitive selling
- Building customer trust and dependence that leads to more profitable, easier repeat business
- There are four levels of B2B selling
- Industry marketing: Defines the approach in a vertical industry
- Account management: Strategy to dominate an enterprise account worldwide
- Opportunity management: Buying events that may be decided by a committee
- Individual level selling: Selling to an individual stakeholder
- Unless it’s a small account, you want to operate on all four levels
- Each level requires different skills, tools, and people
3. The Canyon and the Crucible
- Qualifying vendors to take part in the evaluation is rational as they decide which ones have the right features
- Selecting a final choice is often emotional and political
- As they approach a decision, the deal can change. Some members of the committee favor one option, others another, and some others prefer no change at all.
- Issues shift
- The relative importance of issues in the evaluation changes
- Client may move to non-product issues such as the strength of your company, price, service, or relationship
- Divided Camps
- No vendor has what everyone at the buyer needs
- A power struggle erupts
- Loss of momentum
- Biggest competitor is no action
- Risks of change become apparent, nobody can sell the key decision maker
- Issues shift
- Without a good source of information insider the buyer’s organization, the seller may have no idea what is happening during this crucial time
4. Talent and Team Selling
- There are seven types of salespeople:
- Tellers
- Sellers
- Farmers
- Hunters
- Business developers
- Partners
- Industry networked consultants
- Goal is to use the right type of person for the right type of sale or for the right stage within a sale
- Tellers
- Feature dump
- Consultative sellers
- Ask questions to get information for a diagnosis
- Hunters
- Understand how to defeat a competitor’s strategy and product
- Deal with client as an organization, not just as individuals
- Often not focused on repeat business, which is a problem because you need to sell repeatedly into the same organizations
- Farmers
- Project manager on the first sale may be the most important salesperson for repeat business if your product is complex
- The project manager:
- Delivers and documents results
- Makes higher and wider contacts within the client organization
- Gets information about new potential opportunities in the form of latent needs and problems
- Creates a preference for your solution before future evaluations even happen
- Creates a vision of what a solution would look like
- Finds sponsors with political influence or politically important pains
- The Partner
- Essence is trust in company, product, or individual
- Long term relationship in which each has confidence that the other will not do anything at their expense
- Goes beyond a contractual relationship
- You must solve a high level problem and help them co-manage their business
- You must look beyond their needs to their customers’ needs
- Beware:
- Customer might drain your resources and still put you out for bid
- Account can be large without being a partnership
- Essence is trust in company, product, or individual
- Industry-Networked Consultant
- Speak at conferences and are quoted in trade magazines
- Tellers
5. The Arsenal of Competitive Advantage
- Porter’s three competitive advantages:
- Value differentiated
- Low-price vendor
- Focused on a niche
- Salesperson should:
- Link competitive advantage to company’s strategic issues and to the agenda of right people at the company
- Look beyond the product to the wider advantages of your complete solution, which includes your team, brand, and company. You can win if your product is second best as long as your solution is the best.
- The role of marketing and product is to give sales as many advantages as possible
- The role of sales is to link those advantages to the needs of the company and individuals
Section 2: The Solution: RADAR
6. RADAR
- Goal is to concentrate resources on the most winnable prospects
- Spreading yourself too thin wastes resources; doing 90% of what it takes to win results in zero results
7. Key 1 – Link Solutions to Pain or Gain
- Participate in the definition of the requirements
- Ask why something is a requirement if you don’t have it. It may have been tossed in without thought or as part of a personal agenda.
- Discovering what the problem is that they’re trying to solve will help you disconnect irrelevant requirements from the process
- Strategic vs. tactical pains
- Pains felt by executives trump pains felt by operational level employees
- Issues of strategy trump issues of tactics
- Types of benefits:
- Operational benefits
- Ease of use, efficiency, technical purity, throughput, integration, functionality
- If the decision will be made at the operational level, operational benefits may be all you need
- Cultural benefits
- Financial benefits
- Make the invisible visible by creating a cost justification proposal that sets out the cost of doing nothing on a monthly basis
- Political benefits
- Pain often comes from the political embarrassment of the problem
- Strategic benefits
- Competitive advantage, market share, speed to market, litigation, culture, mergers and acquisitions
- If you keep exploring the pain, you can go higher on the value chain
- Operational benefits
8. Key 2 – Qualify the Prospect
- Assess:
- Will they decide to buy from anyone?
- What is the chance they’ll buy from us?
- How does the opportunity compare to the others I have?
- How much work will it require?
- Qualification is like playing poker. If you call the bet, you see one more card. Is it worth the investment to see the extra card?
- Reasons to qualify out:
- Can’t solve pain
- No access to power
- Decision making process is stacked against us
- Don’t have the resources to pursue it well
- Better opportunities elsewhere
9. Key 3 – Build Competitive Preference
- Assess:
- Can we win?
- How?
- If each person on the committee had to vote today, would they vote for us?
- What are our differentiators?
- How would the competition defeat us?
- Positioning: Say it first
- Controlling the point of entry
- If a prospect contacts you, don’t necessarily rush to call that person back
- You might prefer a different point of entry because the person who calls you may not have access to power, so pursue that different point of entry
- If you get that different point of entry, ask for permission to keep the person in the loop
- There’s a brief window early on in non-government accounts where you have some flexibility over who your primary point of contact is
- Influence the issues
- The customer may not really know what they want and may be looking for intelligent guidance
- Steer the process
- Suggest that the client add steps to the evaluation process that will highlight your strengths
- Identify the influencers
- Win their hearts before it starts
- Overperform on the last sale
10. Key 4 – Determine the Decision Making Process
- Key questions
- How do they think they’ll decide?
- How do you think they’ll decide?
- What is the role of each person?
- When will they decide?
- What is the approval process?
- They often won’t know how they’ll decide until there’s a deadlock. At that point, they’ll come up with a way to break the tie.
- Break up the committee charged with making a decision into each of its parts. Build a message for each component part.
11. Key 5 – Sell to Power
- Map the power structure relevant to the sale by asking about the prospect’s power structure early in the sales process
- Are there powerful people helping you?
- Who influences them?
- Who else might become involved in the decision?
- Who might help your competitors?
- Build social capital by doing favors for people. They’ll return the favor later on when you need help or information.
- Creating alliances
- Departments and people may ally because of common goals, common enemies, or common ideology
- Influencers might lie outside the purchasing organization altogether
- Examples: consultants, friends, lawyers
- Provide access
- Link features to strategic benefits
- Provide information you need to win
12. Key 6 – Communicate the Strategic Plan
- Write down your plan and circulate it through your team
- How will you win?
- What do you sell to whom, where, when?
- Do our tactics support our strategy?
- How could the plan fail?
- Strategize on four levels
- Industry/market level
- Enterprise level
- Opportunity level
- Individual level
- Bring strength to bear against your opponent’s weakness
Section 3: Strategies for Execution
13. Sixteen Opportunity-Level Sales Strategies
- Preemptive strategies: Win before it starts
- Create the demand
- Seek a sole source evaluation
- Align with a power partner – someone they already work with who wants to work with you
- Walk early if you think the decision making process isn’t fair
- Maybe they’ll change it to give you a chance
- Do this early when they need you in the evaluation process to show that they did their due diligence
- Frontal Strategies: Rely on your superior product
- Flanking Strategies: Bring strength against weakness
- Change the pain: Finding new issues to link to that may be sponsored by more powerful people
- Change the power: Bring in new influencers who aren’t engaged yet
- Change the process: Add or remove steps in the evaluation process that allow you to demonstrate your strength or your opponent’s weakness
- Linking solutions or products: Integrate your product with others to create a true solution
- Expanding the scope: Broaden your proposal or the client’s requirements to include things the competition can’t do
- Fractional Strategies: If you can’t win the whole account, get part of it and expand from there
- Carve out a single product or niche to serve
- Once you’re inside, you get more information about what the customer wants and have easier access
- You can make your money on the subsequent sales even if you lose money on the first
- Timing Strategies: Delay or accelerate
- Buy time by raising risk issues
14. Changing Issues and Time-Based Sales Tactics
- Key questions:
- What phase of the decision making process are they in?
- What issues are important given that stage?
- How can we change the issues to be ones that favor us?
- Late in the sales process:
- Prospects focus on a single vendor
- The other vendors are left in limbo as backups. They make no progress but aren’t told no.
- Risk becomes more important
- Price resurfaces: Several firms can meet our needs but your price is higher. Can you lower it?
- Working with price objections
- Buyers often feel a moral obligation to try to negotiate a lower price even though it’s not their top priority
- Ask them what people will remember down the line: A slightly better price or the quality of the product?
- Don’t go to purchasing or legal without your sponsor
- The company’s strategy is often to bring someone in to negotiate for them who doesn’t understand the value and will therefore be obstinate
- Buyers often feel a moral obligation to try to negotiate a lower price even though it’s not their top priority
- Late in the process, competitors may make desperate moves to stay in the game. Predict these and plan for them.
15. Ten Individual-Level Strategies
- Ask if you’d win if they voted today
- With each individual, the goal is to either get their vote or win without it
- Levers in a strategy to influence an individual:
- Pain
- Preference
- Power
- Part in the process
- Strategies:
- Support and motivate your advocates
- Bring in others to the decision
- Raise their perception of the pain
- Ask them to change their part by joining the evaluation team
- Borrow preference by having an influencer who is for you talk to individuals who oppose you
- Disconnect a person from the pain or the decision
- Ignore them
- Change their preference
- Outvote them
16. Selling at C-Level – Calling on Chief Executives and Political Navigation
- Key questions:
- What is your point of entry?
- How do you get access?
- What’s your pitch when you get there?
- How do you get back?
- Ideally, you start at the C-level so you never have to go over anyone’s head
- If you can’t, find a reason why it’s in the mid-level person’s interest to take you to the decision maker
- Lateral project scope: the project involves many departments
- Strategic project scope: the project matters to top executives
- Equivalent rank: I’m bringing in my VP, will you bring yours?
- Bargaining for information. If you are only in the game because they need to do due diligence, trade the information they need for the access you need.
- Sponsorship is key. You could be sponsored for higher access by:
- A friend of your target
- Previous customers
- Other divisions
- Channel partners
- Professional associations
- To get sponsors, provide both emotional and political benefits, not just rational benefits
- Appeal to executive interests
- Strategic
- Political: Stockholders, board of directors, unions
- Financial: ROI, cash flow, stock price, productivity
- Cultural: Innovation, risk-taking, teamwork, competitiveness
- To appeal to executive interests, you need to be an industry expert, not just a product expert
Section 4: Winning Before the Battle – Account Management
17. From Opportunity Management to Account Management
- Key questions:
- What is the overall plan for the account?
- Should we invest additional resources?
- How do we build trust?
- How do we change their buying process?
- How can we earn preferred vendor status?
- Can we partner with this account?
- Goal is to make it easy to win repeat business
- Account management sells between the sales by wielding influence before a sales process even begins
- Account management influences:
- Preferences
- Requirements
- Processes
- Players
- Issues
- Steps to effective account management:
- Demonstrate: Exceed expectations and make your sponsors look good
- Evaluate: Choose the right accounts to invest time in
- Radiate: Leverage the first engagement to navigate to the next by identifying decision makers and building preference preemptively
- Collaborate and elevate: Become a strategic asset, not an operational commodity
- Dominate: Give them no reason to go to the competition by being excellent
- Inoculate and integrate: Build personal loyalty with people in the account
