Sales

Being Relentless – a Marketing discipline

Affirmative action, Marketing, persistence, Sales

Relentless is an adjective.

Synonyms – Persistent, Non-Stop, Continuous…

An adjective qualifies the noun – grade 5 English grammar course. In this case, the noun is going to be a person. A relentless person a persistent person is how this will be used.

So what is the significance of this English grammar lesson for today’s post.

The other day in one of the posts I mentioned about the I love marketing podcast episode with Chris Voss and I explained why I admired him because of his usage of of words.

With a background in hostage negotiation you have to be careful with your words and the words should have the the exact Nuance of what is being thought by the speaker. That is one of the reasons why his vocabulary is so good.

During the podcast, one of the questions asked to him was on the launch of his book, in 2017 I think, and how he went about promoting it.

One word that he mentioned which immediately stuck in my head was the fact that he was RELENTLESS in ensuring that he was on two interviews a week at the minimum, to promote his book which he is doing to this day.

While the book – Never Split the Difference – is very good, but if people don’t come to know about the book they will not go and buy it. It’s a terrific lesson in marketing from a hostage negotiator. If you keep yourself aware you can get marketing lessons even from the small kiosk on the kerb.

We may have a terrific product or a terrific service but if people do not come to know about it then people will not buy it.

In one word Chris had put out such a big strategy for marketing

Everyone knows about Coke. But they relentlessly advertise about their product so that when you visit the shop or restaurant and you are thirsty the first word which comes out of your mouth is a Coke.

Everyday in marketing and I include sales as part of marketing, if you are not somehow reaching more and more customers everyday , by some mechanism , you will not be able to build a sustainable pipeline and a predictable business.

You need not be brilliant, you need not be teriffic , but if you want to succeed you have to be relentless, persistent et al.

Till next time

Carpe Diem!!!

Playing the Devil’s Advocate in B2B sales to realise higher prices

B2B, compelling, Customers, Sales

I have a major challenge pushing my sales people to sell at a higher price. They always have a pushback on the price saying the customer won’t buy. And we have big arguments.

Is this something you face. Is it difficult for you to charge a higher price for your services. Do you always end up losing orders, because your price is “high”

One technique, which I have shared to a small extent earlier also, is to play the devil’s advocate with the customer. There’s a caveat when you want to use this technique – you have to be sure that you provide the best services. If not, then first go and put your house in order. Learn to provide the best possible services at whatever price that you think is good.

With the devil’s advocate you make the customer convince you that she wants to do business with you. If the customer is able to convince you, then she can, internally, within her organisation, also convince people. Most of the times in B2B scenarios, the customer is surrounded by so many vendors who are all trying to say one of two things – I am the cheapest and / or I am the best. And the customer doesn’t believe any of them. In addition a lot of times, the person who is representing the customer, is also not clear why she wants to go after the solution. Most often its because someone higher up in the “pay grade” has asked them to find out.

So some of you would already be squirming that it’s not possible to raise the value of your offering. Just be with me for a minute and try this in your next meeting.

So first of all start with the first WHY – why are you wanting to do ‘this’ – whatever it is that they have asked you to come for, to discuss. Then you get to the second WHY – why is ‘this’ important in the bigger scheme of things in your business.

The third WHY starts to get you to figure out the value from a business perspective – WHY are you considering ‘this’ kind of a solution, couldn’t you have done it way cheaper by doing ‘that’ where the ‘that’ is an alternate and much lower price way to solve a problem. A very simplistic example of this would be – what are you wanting to buy a truck for, when you can use a bullock cart to transport the goods at a much lower cost. This will get the customer to come out, with what it is , that is key to them – a truck can carry longer distances faster and we want to get our products to de delivered to the farthest parts of the country. A bullock cart would take months and our competition will capture the market during that time.

Now you are getting a feel of what is important to them – long distance travel, fast.

Now comes the fourth WHY – I get your reason for not considering a bullock cart, but why are you wanting to consider our 10000CC trucks (just a a random figure) when you can have cheaper 5000CC trucks (another random figure) . At this stage if she says Yes we are considering 5000CC trucks and they are happy with that option, then they will expect your price to come closer to the 5000CC option and you will only play a losing game.

On the other hand if she says, I understand that the 5000CC trucks are cheaper, but their ability to drive continuously is limited to 3 hours while we would prefer if the truck can be driven continuously for 7-8 hours, then you now have different playing field. And you have not had to convince her.

You need to remember that in B2B scenarios, you are looking at professional buyers, who do buying all the time and want to compare you always with the lowest priced option. And you can keep trying to convince them of the value you bring but they won’t get convinced. However once you make them come out with the issues themselves, it becomes a lot easier since they are now providing all the compelling reasons.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

The concept of Value in Services – 3

B2B, Sales, services

I had written two posts earlier on this topic. I wanted to explore a couple of other things to get this topic to a logical end.

We are clear that the value is what the customer thinks it’s worth. But there are a couple of other components – one is the price and the other is your cost of providing the service. One thing that I have learnt with service projects, in B2B customers, is that, they always take longer than planned. And costing is always done on the plan.

Since most of us are under pressure to pick up the deal, we don’t like the idea of putting in buffers for the project going over time, because we are afraid that competition will pick up the order because of the increase in price.

The over runs generally happen in the final stages of the project. If you were to think of the full project as an elephant walking through a gate, then, generally all the components of the project – the trunk, the ears, the 4 legs, everything comes out but the the tail gets stuck in the gate for some reason or the other.

This is the time that the final User Acceptance is getting done and because the user feels that she should not miss anything, she tries to ensure that all the “t”s are crossed and all the “I”s are dotted.

This is where your costs go higher than you had budgeted. The resources that you had thought will get off the project, can’t leave the project to start on another one. That is the people. Then there are the pieces of equipment and tools that are getting used in the project. You will be paying for all this. Without realising, slowly the actual profit starts falling.

The customer doesn’t realise this. If you take the argument of cost over-run to the procurement person, he will find all kinds of reasons to put you on the back foot and in most cases never pay-up.

So you need to figure out a way to ensure that your “Costs” actually take this into account when you give the “Price” to the customer and you need to figure out a way to show the “Value” to the customer. You also need to be clear on the process of signing off the project from the customer end. What kind of tests will they get done, what kind of reports will be needed, the kind of dashboards that will be needed. List out all the points up front while closing the order.

Till next time then …. make more profits

Carpe Diem!!!

B2B small value sales

B2B, Sales

Generally whenever I write about the B2B customers, I write about the complexity, the inertia and the lack of interest in changing the incumbent. All these stem from the fact that I am talking of a mid to high value sale. I will define the mid to high value sale as anything more than $25000/- or greater than INR 10,00,000/-

B2B companies also buy small value items where the values could be very small and local managers have the authority to close the sale. If you are dealing in that kind of items, there’s no point in spending time tying to showcase the whole process of how you do a migration or a transition etc. It will only waste your time.

You need to manage the sales cycles depending on the value of the product or service that you are selling. If you are selling a low value deal then you cannot afford to spend time in building a proposal for each prospect. The cost of building a proposal in some cases would turnout to be higher than the revenue.

You need to therefore focus on building a volume of deals, where you take verbal confirmations and then just send them a mail confirming the discussion and asking for the order.

In case of small value orders a lot of big customers actually also enter into rate contracts so that they don’t have to negotiate these deals each time that they have to be done.

So choose your method of sales depending on the kind of values that you expect to pick up.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!