The Common Sense Sales Blog

A Cup of Coffee with Furman Continues

My coffee chat with Steve Furman continues:

 

Jason:  Steve, so far the feedback on our conversation has been strong.  There is so much to explore as we try to understand the challenges both buyers and sellers face when they are working on big RFP level deals.  One of the interesting things I've seen in the past is poorly written RFPs that have the same question asked multiple times; a clear indication that various stakeholders have submitted their departmental needs but that they haven't been aligned with the entirety of the organization’s scope requirements.

 

With that in mind, how do you lead the needs assessment that takes place?  How do you identify the internal owners, and how is that process managed before you even consider engaging vendors?

 

Steve: Your needs assessment should be informed by your strategy and roadmap.  Well crafted plans should include identifying the capabilities a company will need to build or buy.  The roadmap will tell you when you will need to acquire that capability or skill.  If you have been forward thinking enough to conduct annual performance evaluations of your agency or vendor (“A/V”) then you already have a baseline from internal stakeholders.  If not, you should solicit input from the people in your organization who work directly with the A/V, as well as the people who are directly impacted by the products and services that they provide.

 

Jason: This is great insight, and actually very useful for existing vendors or agencies that should understand their clients’ needs.  Can you talk a little about some of the challenges you face internally on whether or not to pursue a project?  We often hear that inertia is a huge factor and can have a big impact on the opportunity.  If this is true, how do you navigate through this?

 

Steve: You have definitely hit on a big challenge.  Unless things are completely out of control with an A/V, there are always switching costs that must be carefully evaluated.  There is also the "grass is always greener" syndrome.  It's not always the case.  As far as projects go, each firm has a way that they scorecard value and prioritize projects.  One has to master that process in order to get their project considered and ultimately approved.

 

Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with inertia.  It's the force that keeps things moving while we sleep, but it is so difficult to overcome when you want to inject change or a fresh perspective. One of the things a sharp sales person can do is demonstrate how they have helped companies through transitions and proactively offer references, without waiting to be asked.  Another thing is to find out what the fear points are and offer solutions for them.  Oftentimes a company is just not ready to take something on.  Every firm is at a different place on the maturity curve.  Understanding where they are is critical for sales people.  Sometimes it means sitting on the sidelines until that time has come. If you play it right you will get the first call.

 

Jason:  Steve, this is phenomenal information.  Having run teams that sell to decision makers like you for quite some time, the importance of understanding an organization’s needs  cannot be overstated.  But you're right; it extends beyond the tactical solution and into the pain points, organizational challenges, and costs associated with change.  Essentially, it comes down to leveraging consultative selling and exhibiting patience.  I'm looking forward to our next cup of virtual coffee.  Just to get you ready, I'm going to ask some questions around the impact of user/buyers and performance pressure on existing A/V's.

 

As always, Steve blogs at http://www.expedientmeans.com/.  We are happy to take questions as we go through this series.  I can be reached on Twitter @jason_simon and Steve @stevefurman

SaaS Selling and Buying. A Cup of Coffee with Steve Furman

RFP's are daunting exercises for both the buyer and seller of SaaS marketing technologies.  Over the years, I have had the opportunity to work through many of these processes with a wide variety of Fortune 500 companies from every major vertical.  The most common thread I've found is that there isn't one.  Some organizations run RFP's as a matter of procurement driven process; while others are truly seeking a new or better solution.  I started thinking about the level of work that goes into the RFP process from both the buyers and sellers perspective.  Since I understand all too well the effort that sales teams and their company's put into participating in a RFP, I decided to learn more about the evaluation process on the buyers side.

I reached out to an old friend and a respected client of mine for insight.  Steve Furman of Discover Financial Services is currently the Director, Design, Customer Experience and Social Media (http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevefurman) for Discover.  In 2002, Steve was leading the email team at DFS as they were upgrading, enhancing and innovating email marketing for the financial services company.  It was here that we met and began a lasting relationship that was built on mutual respect and appreciation for one another's responsibility to making our business interaction work.  At the time I was leading the sales effort for Bigfoot Interactive as we were seeking to win the Discover RFP as email service provider.

Steve and I have decided to have a virtual cup of coffee and discuss the elements that help form a well run RFP from the clients point of view, and how good sales organizations can effectively communicate their value propositions during the sales process.

In part 1; we'll discuss how an organization should decide how it's going to RFP and what they need to look for in the open market.  A clearly defined need from the client will help drive a well run evaluation of platforms as so many SaaS and marketing technology have similarities and need to accentuate their differentiators to provide a viable solution.

Jason:  "Steve, focusing on marketing technology, what are the triggers that cause and organization like yours to consider either adding a new service to your processes or replace and existing vendor?"

Steve:   "Probably the biggest trigger is the need to increase the impact marketing technology can have on business results.  Over time firms have seen significant growth in the online users/customers/subscribers they serve as well as the amount of content/SKU's/ they offer.  Due to this growth, connecting a buyer with the appropriate product has become more difficult.  Firms need to add to their arsenal of interactive marketing tools to better identify the consumer and present an attractive offer quickly.  That need drives the request to add capability."

Jason:  "That makes sense, particularly as new needs are identified.  New add ons in terms of need and technology.  But what about when it's time to replace a vendor or upgrade?"

Steve:  "As far as replacing a current agency or vendor (A/V) I use the following guidelines.  

• Have your business results improved during the time you have been working with the your A/V?
• Do they help you innovate around YOUR core competencies?
• Do they bring you ideas that spark your desire and courage to innovate?
• Has their customer base grown?
• Do you get access to top thinkers at the A/V?
• Are their business results growing?
• Are they pushing you or are you pulling from them?
• Do they have a thoughtful and plausible strategic roadmap?
• Has their quality been improving?
• Has your account management been stable?

If you answer NO to 3 of these questions put them on a watch list and have a fireside chat with them.  If you answer No to 5 or more, it's time to start looking."

As you can see, the internal process a company goes through to arrive a decision on selecting a new technology or replacing a vendor boils down to assessing performance and business metrics that are focused on growth and forward thinking.  In the next installment of this "coffee" chat, we'll explore what the buyer goes through to determine which elements are important during the needs assessment.

Steve blogs at http://www.expedientmeans.com/.  We are happy to take questions as we go through this series.

From A to B Goal Setting

I was thinking today about the concept of "unqualified" prospects and how sales directors of all levels find themselves in stalled deals.  The reality is that deals stall for a ton of reasons, but the one I think is most likely is that they are not being managed appropriately during the sales process. 

The problem is that while we're moving prospects through the sales "chambers" we as sales professionals forget that each sales event requires a goal.  I tell my teams that the stated goal is to sell on each call, but the key is to know what you are selling.  For example, during a pre-qualification call where you doing a needs assessment it would honestly be difficult to expect to close the deal; however, a more reasonable expectation might be a definitive next step.  Meaning?  A scheduled next call, meeting or demo. 

Stalled deals are often the result of under qualifying the opportunity and failing to manage the sale.  Frankly knowing when you don't have a real opportunity is important as "empty" deals in your pipeline drain your time, your teams effort and your credibility at forecasting accurate deal closures. 

Know what you are attempting to accomplish on each call and focus your presentation to that end.  Once you establish what you are focusing on, the smaller bites will lead to greater success.  Each call or meeting has to get from A to B and have a result.  Map these out a track them. 

 

Did You Call Your Prospect Stupid?

It never ceases to amaze me how powerful a tool asking questions can be.  In my career, I've worked with many different types of senior sales directors and the common thread amongst the very good ones was simple; asking questions.  But that is only part of the equation.  In fact, the easy part of the equation is simply asking for insight, the hard part is actually listening.

In my time, I've worked with several sales "professionals" who have predetermined the solution sets for their prospects; prior to engaging them in conversation.  They walk into meetings prepared to tell the prospect what is wrong with their current programming, content, design, execution and technology.  They then proceed to walk them through a "solution" that only includes their products and services and of course, is the magic bullet that will lead them to the promised land.  Essentially, they call their prospects, stupid.

Human beings are intuitive, and they can pick up on subtle inferences to the above.  If you call out a prospect for being less than efficient at their job, you set the tone for contentious relationship.  If the opportunity you are seeking is competitive, this type of selling can only offer your opponents for the deal an opening. Years ago, my team lost a deal to a perfectly aligned prospect.  When I did the postmortem with my counterpart at the publishing company they said, "your guy walked in here and told us we were doing everything wrong.  We were insulted and stopped listening to him during his presentation.  Your tool is great and likely would have worked for us, but we didn't want to work with your team."

Frankly, without asking questions it's hard to understand what is driving certain campaigns or program management within an organization.  The reality is that there are political and organizational pressures that can cause a program to appear to be less than optimized.  One of the biggest is to understand who owns the revenue stream inside of a business and how your interactive marketing team is serving their company. On more than a few occasions I have learned that our prospect contacts act as an internal support team and that product line or business line GM's drive the timing, content and cadence of their programs.

Ask informed questions that will give YOU insight into your prospect.  You may not be able to lead them from chamber to chamber in meeting one, but you can gain powerful understandings that will inform your sales efforts down the line.

 

 

 

5 Must Do's on Negotiating Pricing

Putting pricing together for a prospect can be a tricky exercise in today's competitive landscape.  Trying to find the right price point and present your rationale for this can be daunting because you are typically doing this in a blind fashion; with little insight into your competitors’ positioning and what the prospect may expect.  The reality is that if you are working in a commoditized sector, pricing will be a key driver to whether or not you win the deal.

 

So the concept of pre-negotiating is important.  It is your job to work with your prospects and contacts to get a feel for what their threshold of expectation is on pricing.  Understanding their budget and how they arrived at their conclusions is going to drive the work you do to present the right mix of pricing.  Each of the elements that you use to determine the right fit will be key in taking away the guess work that is often associated with this part of the sales process.  It's also the part of selling that most of us don't like.  Simply, this is when most sales directors feel they can lose a deal versus win a deal.

 

The entirety of your selling process needs to be a whittling down effort to understand the fundamentals I always blog about.  Pain points.  Needs.  Solutions and wants.  Along the way, as you're asking the qualifying questions and building your solution, you should also include questions around the budget.  For SaaS selling this should include direct questions like, "What is your current allocation for this?"  Other less direct questions can contribute too.  For example, "I understand you're using client services support.  How is that factored into your budget with your current provider?"  It remains important to ask the questions so that simple yes or no answers can be avoided.

 

Pre-Negotiating is a developed skill.  It's part of the dance.  Not only are you attempting to understand the fit for the prospect, but you also have to know if they are qualified to meet your pricing standards and your margin requirements internally.  The last thing you want to do is flag a prospect to your pipeline and then have them under qualify for budget or cause revenue pressure for your colleagues in-house.

 

1. Use the prequalifying time on your deal to explore budget issues for your prospect.
2. Ask questions around pricing as it relates to services or other ancillary support issues that are part of your prospect’s current relationship.
3. You're in sales! Ask direct questions as they relate to pricing pain points and thresholds for budgeting.
4. Don't assume a thing on pricing.  Despite what most prospects tell you, pricing is always a MAJOR contributor to decision making; however, never forget to ask some questions about what's important in their decision making process.
5. Make pricing a collaborative effort and include your prospect in your process.  This will help you create pricing that the buyer has already bought into.

We'll continue down this path; because SaaS pricing and proposal delivery are big issues; a place where many prospects get caught on their way to success.

 

As always, feedback is welcome!!!

 

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You Brought a Magician to A Sales Meeting?

True Story Alert:

Several years ago a colleague of mine and I were sitting around thinking about how we wanted to handle a major presentation to a competitors largest client.  We knew what the pain points were for them and how our competitors were handling a particular need.  Their platform didn't allow them to provide the client a simple solution and they had to "sell" the process they were promoting.  Essentially, they were providing an automated solution in a "full-service" mode and via a creative descriptive process, delivering their automation through a man made work around.  It wasn't efficient and it didn't provide the back end reporting that our system did. 

During the prep; someone on our team said, "it's almost like they are making this work through magic."  And thus it was said and thus it would be.  Magic.  Magic became our theme of the meeting; as it was important to help point out the prospect that their current process was hocus pocus and ours was the real deal.  But how to convey this.  We huddled and huddled and knew that the meeting had to be unique.  We met with our CEO; who was very interested in the "WOW" theory and we brainstormed.  Our solution; hire a magician.

This meeting was to be held several hundred miles away with approximately 15 people from the prospects team.  There had been a significant amount of research done before hand, countless onsite meetings, Webex meetings and calls.  From this, we hatched our plan.  We had a three hour window to present our solution to the user buyers throughout the organization.  We wanted to impress, so we hired a local magician to join us in the meeting.  He was instructed to wear a suit, bring his tricks in briefcase and walk in with us.  He looked like we did. 

In we walked, breakfast in tow.  We had asked for 30 minutes in the front of the meeting for breakfast, coffee and socializing. We didn't know all of the players in the room and we wanted to mingle.  We introduced our team; and our magician, as a sales engineer and off we went.  About 5 minutes into the breakfast, our magician walks to the front of the room and opens his briefcase.  Out comes a red rubber ball and he walks up to an IT manager on the prospect side, asks him what was in his ear, and pulls our the ball.  Slowly the other eyes in the room start watching our sales engineer pulling a red rubber ball from ears, under hands, behind their backs.  Then the rings followed along with balloons and other magic tricks.  The room was dead silent, all eyes on our SE as he continued to do tricks.  For a moment, I thought we misplayed the audience and we were dead.  Then the laughter started and the prospects employees were engaging and playing along.

My key contact looked at me across the room with an face that could only say, "WTH?"  I let her know that it would end alright, hang in there.  She agreed and off we went. 

Near the end of the act, I walked up in front of the room and said the following, "I want to thank you all for sitting through this.  As you guessed by now, he is not a sales engineer but a magician.  We have a lot to show you today about our platform and everything you will see in our tool is real and actionable; in fact, what your looking at now is the last magic you will see today."

The next 3 hours went great and when we got to our automation set; that was built into the tool, we reemphasised the difference between magic and reality.  At lunch that day, we were told over hamburgers that we had won the business.

A risky venture but a memorable one as well.  We took a chance at wowing the audience and won.  This isn't a recommended course of action, but if you're going to take a risk, TAKE A RISK. 

That  day was....magical.

Sales Post-Mortems, 5 Tips for SaaS Selling

One of the most important aspects of any sales event; whether it be a single sales meeting or a trade show, is the post-mortem meeting to review what you just heard and learned from your time with the prospect.  In this series, we have discussed the importance of understanding your prospects needs to form a more perfect solution to drive through the sales process.  Taking time to gain and quantify the feedback from a just completed prospect interaction is key.

You should have at least one other set of eyes with you on a prospect engagement.  This allows your colleague to be listening while you are talking; and vice versa.  This should be "ACTIVE" listening so they can fill natural breaks on the flow of conversation with valuable insight, not just a well timed, "uh uh," or "right."  But more importantly they/you should be looking for nonverbal keys and insights to help you qualify the prospect more accurately.  None of this will mean a thing if you don't do the post-mortem.

Recently, I had a chance to participate in a trade show post-mortem.  Sitting together around a round table; each member of the team had the opportunity to comment on their interaction with each prospect that we engaged with.  It was a great use of time. Some of the team members had conversations with the prospects on the side and offered "sidebar" insight that the rest of the group may not have been privy to.  Others engaged with them on demo's and were able to share their views on their technical needs.  Yet, others had business level only chats, that indicated needs, timing and other service requirements.  This enabled us to assemble a profile of the prospect that will dictate the selling solution moving forward.

For Post Mortem Prospect Development

1. All team members have equal imput on their interactions and impressions of the prospect
2. Team leaders need to keep everyone focused on what the goal is of building the profile
3. Look for insight for client needs, technical needs, timing and financial pain points
4. Have the post-mortem as soon as you can, so you can retain the nonverbal insight as well
5. Ensure your team has agreement on the selling path and begin the process of creating a solution

These steps will help guide your path as your move towards a successful selling path.  Not all prospects are the same as we all know.  Treat them as individual opportunities and you'll see your pipeline grow with qualifed opportunities versus space fillers.

Till next time!!!

Use the Floor Time Well at Your Tradeshow

Just some random observations from the show floor.

Watching too many companies use this time to schmooze with existing customers and not be aggressive with prospecting.  Wondering why.  In one place there is a pool of viable new clients. 

Too many companies don't have demo environments set up.  Are you kidding me?  Would you try to sell a car without a car in the showroom?  This floor has over 100 vendors and I'd say that less than 25% of them have active environments up and running.  This is great because I guess they don't have to sell or show new features to their clients.

Lots of sales people standing around in their booths, not working and not actively pulling prospects into the booth. Not a good use of time.  C'mon folks, step it up.  This is a great place to have a centralized meeting of the minds.

Got to walk to the floor and see the competition and potential partners.  Everyone is looking to grow their business.  This is a must. 

Happy my team is doing all of the right things.  Results are already manifesting themselves.

4 Ideas on Tradeshow Preparation

Greetings from warm Palm Desert, California where I'm attending eTail West with my sales team.  We've worked hard over the past few months to prepare ourselves from several days of interacting with a core group of our targeted prospects.  This event represents an investment in prospecting and customer relationship buidling, so I'm taking a time out of our QB series to talk about tips for prepping for trade shows. 

This show is a vertical category, which means it represents one of our target market places.  We spent time thinking through how we wanted to present ourselves and decided that we would focus on 2 major offerings we have that appeal to this market, and those 2 only.  This allows us to have a distinct message and voice to the marketplace, and to distill the qualified opportunities in an efficient manner when we return to home base.

A few thoughts on trade show prep.

1. Pick the shows you will attend carefully. It's important to be visible and smart regarding your audience selections.  Branding and market awareness are important, but strong lead flow is more important.  Be in front of the right people.
2. Limit your product offering to digestible bites that can be easily understood by prospects and booth visitors.  They will interact with lots of other folks selling what seem like similar products and services.  Distinguish what makes you different and stay with that.  You're fighting against the clutter, make your time with these folks valuable for them.
3. You, yes YOU are there to work.  Despite the social settings and the informal interaction, measuring the success of your show will depend on the value of the opportunities you develop upon your return.  These are important days for you to generate a personal connection with your prospects and begin that "next level" relationship.  Don't blow it.
4. Be professional at all of the events.  Seriously, there are ample chances to "distinguish" yourself at cocktail parties and dinners, be smart about how you present yourself to your industry.

More blogging from Palm Desert!!! Stay warm America.